얀 마텔의 『파이 이야기』와 『베아트리스와 버질』

Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and Beatrice and Virgil: An Allegory as the Metamorphosis Occurring Between Animal and Man

Yann Martel’s two novels, Life of Pi and Beatrice and Virgil, deal with entirely different subject matters, but have something in common. Both are about outrageously hard and absurd lives, the shipwrecked life and the Holocaust, and both employ the vehicle of the animals in their representation. The survival narrative and the representation of Holocaust make the most significant use of the relation between human beings and animals. Animals are an allegory for humans in those absurdly and extremely hard situations and at the same time it is almost impossible for humans not to be animals in those situations. The tiger with his life force in Life Of Pi is no other than Pi in absolute hunger and extreme fear, since the power of animalistic sensation hits the human character’s sense organs. In Beatrice and Virgil animals are the vehicle for the tenor of the Jews in the Holocaust, but the relation between the signifier and the signified is so obscure and confused that it is almost unclear whether the novel is about animals or Holocaust. The confusion creates a certain common zone. In both novels, one becomes the other, a man becomes an animal, and vice versa. For Gilles Deleuze via Baruch Spinoza, figurative languages are not a mere vehicle for the the hidden, already fixed meaning. What matters is not the interpretation involving the signified but the intensity of the signifier itself. The latter immediately touches the reader’s or viewer’s senses before their cognitive faculties begin to work, thus one being is metamorphosized into another. It is not that humans are like animals, but that they are animals themselves.