Imagine a story of a shipwrecked boy in a lifeboat with his mother, an injured sailor and the ship’s cook. Imagine, in the desperation of hunger, the cook kills first the sailor, then the mother, and is then killed by the boy, not for food but for survival. You don’t have to imagine, of course, because it is the plot of Yann Martel’s novel ‘Life of Pi’. It is a remarkable story, but in the novel it is cast in a subordinate position to the story as told in the main body of the novel. In this version of the story the boy Pi is in the boat, not with people, but with the surviving animals of a menagerie which was the ship’s cargo: a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena and a tiger. This ‘animal’ version of the story is doubted by the investigators interviewing Pi in hospital after his rescue. He then tells them the mundane ‘human’ version. Neither version, he says, will help them understand why the ship sank. He asks them which version they prefer, and they say they prefer the animal story: “And so it goes with God,” says Pi. Martel, in the same vein, has said himself “A story with God is the better story”.1 He is therefore linking the story, and stories in general, with faith. The superior story is said to be the one which gives greater pleasure, and this greater pleasure comes from suspending disbelief; ‘so it goes’ that to enjoy the full flavour of life you must make a leap of faith.
In terms of art or literature there is a problem, immediately, with the assumption that the animal story is superior or more pleasurable. How exactly can that be assessed? Isn’t it possible that if the author himself had enjoyed telling the mundane version and given it the same creative time and space, then it might read as the more enjoyable version? Isn’t he using his hidden authority as an author to stack the cards? The story of the cook, the sailor and his mother is remarkable, as I’ve said, but it is not the one given the authorial attention. Closely related to this problem is another assumption: The pleasure you get from either version requires you to suspend disbelief. The cook is no more real than the hyena; they are both fictions that require you to imagine. It may be that Martel is suggesting the more improbable the story the more enjoyable. But again how do we quantify that enjoyment? Would Anna Karenina be improved by the appearance of a dragon in the theatre at St Petersburg? By extension, the proposition might be made that the very improbability of the story of god makes it a ‘better’ story and therefore ‘truer’. This is actually the oldest christian apologetics; it can be found in Tertullian’s ‘De Carne Christi’ where he states ‘certum est, quia impossible’ (it is certain because it is impossible).
The terrible logic of this position should be discussed elsewhere, but more pertinently, here, what these formulations and assumptions concerning story and faith call to mind is the gradient of pleasure/unpleasure in Freud’s theoretical writing. I don’t want to discuss the ‘pleasure principle’ here because that would be too general, but I do want to concentrate on the gradient of pleasure/unpleasure in relation to story and literature. When we are told, for example, “the hyena is really just the cook”, there may be a reaction of disappointment or diminished pleasure in having the true object revealed from behind the façade. We may feel the analysis produces unpleasure. This is exactly what C.S. Lewis attested to in his first acquaintance with psychoanalysis and which he addressed in his essay ‘Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism’. He felt the Freudian analysis of a literary symbol was a diminishment of literary pleasure. In revealing the ‘true’ object of our pleasure behind the symbolic object “the affective temperature ought to rise and not to fall”2 and that “If we are conscious of loss in exchanging the garden for the female body, then clearly the garden added something more than concealment, something positive, to our pleasure”.2 I think this is a misunderstanding on two counts: firstly, it is the same assumption that the symbol, the ‘garden’, universally adds something to the pleasure; and secondly, that the two forms of narrative – the mundane and the symbolic – are working against each other and expressing different things, or that the symbolic adds something beyond mundane nature – something supernatural, sublime or transcendent – ‘so it goes with god’.
Lewis’s fear is a common one: that the analysis of symbols is reductive. He takes particular issue with the word ‘only’ in a sentence such as “the garden is only the female body after all.” Here is the crux, I think: a symbol is a pre-verbal image and this may account for the ‘magical’ quality so often ascribed to it. You might say it can give greater pleasure, also, because of this infantile quality. Symbolisation, or the division of the mundane and the symbolic, is something that occurs with acquisition of language and the differentiation of a unified world into its parts. Put another way, the animal or child state emerges from the fog of unconsciousness into awareness of its own subjectivity. In the infantile ‘mind’ its primary narcissistic state does not differentiate or distinguish such things as mother, breast, room, garden etc. To the infantile mind the mother is a garden; the garden and mother are co-extensive.
In this light the languages of mundane mother and symbolic garden cannot be used to establish transcendence because they have the same roots. The tiger story does not transcend the boy story, but points instead to its infantile roots – the perhaps greater pleasure coming also from these infantile roots. In this vein too, the unified field of infantile experience makes all language symbolic, or, as I said earlier, both the cook and the hyena are both fictions. One is not bigger or more transcendent than the other. The disappointment that Lewis felt in the mundane, and the greater pleasure Martel feels in the symbolic, may be the product of a wishing for the return of an infantile sublime.
1 Yann Martel interview (http://textualities.net/jennie-renton/yann-martel-interview/).
2 C.S. Lewis – ‘Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism’ (1960)