Or, the post where I probably lose some of my already small set of subscribers…
Religion has been on my mind a lot again lately; in part, that’s because I’ve just finished typing up my handwritten first draft of my second novel Obsolete Constellations, and religion underpins a lot of what goes on in there with the characters, the narrative, and the values of the book.
I should more accurately say that the characters, narrative and values of the book are underpinned by what I will euphemistically call my deep misgivings about religion. Simply put, I have some huge problems with religion. More correctly put, I have some huge problems with what religion leads a lot of people to think, say and do, especially when that then impacts their stance on what other people choose to think, say or do.
While it’s not my place to tell other people what they should believe — although a fair few people have tried to tell me what to believe over the years — I’ve come to realise that one of my (many) issues with religion is that it contradicts some of the fundamental things that I like most about storytelling, and I think this is an acceptable space to explore that in a bit more detail.
So, if you’re still here and still reading, I’ll elaborate.
We recently watched an adaptation of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi on National Theatre at Home. I knew next to nothing about the novel, apart from there being a young man on a boat in the middle of the ocean with a tiger, a zebra and a few other animals. I’d always been a bit curious about it, but never intrigued enough to bother reading it, or seeing Ang Lee’s film version, or going to a theatre to see the stage version. So we watched it, and I was very surprised, not to mention more than a bit dismayed, to discover that the whole thing was not, in fact, about a young man on a boat in the middle of the ocean with a tiger and a zebra and a few other animals at all.
It turned out — and I don’t think I was misinterpreting it — to be making a case for why we should believe in God.
Straight to the internet I went, with my blood pressure having gone up a notch. Turns out the internet is full of elaborations on what Life of Pi is about, but the one that made the biggest impression on me was an interview with Yann Martel himself. Here he is, in his own words:
“This book is not escapist fiction. It’s to do with discovering life through a religious perspective. Religion doesn’t deny reality, it explains it. Secular critics ask, ‘How can you believe?’ This question doesn’t faze people with faith.”
My blood pressure went up another notch. A little later, the interviewer asks: would you say that religion and fiction work in the same way? — and Martel replies:
“To the extent that for either to work you have to suspend your disbelief. The subtext of Life of Pi can be summarised in three lines. 1) Life is a story. 2) You can choose your story. 3) A story with God is a better story.”
My blood pressure has lowered since, but I’ve still been left feeling rather angry about this for weeks now. I’ll confine my thoughts here solely to why I find this so problematic on the level of how I think a story is supposed to work, and why I think Martel’s attitude is completely at odds with such an approach.
In a nutshell — I think that a story always has to have the potential to go in any direction at any time, and a story always has to end with the potential to keep on going in new directions beyond the final full stop.
No matter what genre or style it’s written in, no matter how formulaic a particular story might be, throughout its span and beyond that span, there must always be the potential for that story to follow an unusual or unpredictable course, and to suggest that such an unusual or unpredictable course might continue after the story we’re reading has finished.
Not everyone has been content to let stories do that, though. The unpredictable course is full of danger, the possibility of us having to confront things we might not want to confront, or that others might want to shield us from. The old traditional device of “And they all lived happily ever after” was a desperate straw-clutch to reassure children, or more likely, for adults or parents to try to reassure themselves, that life will always turn out for the best, and good will be rewarded, and evil will not prevail.
We all know, though, that life is a lot more nuanced than that — except, it seems, a certain kind of story-telling, or more accurately, a certain kind of story-teller, would still like us to believe in the consolations of a fairy-tale ending, even when this possibility is routinely disproven by how things manifestly work in the real world.
Life of Pi provides an interesting example of this process in action. The animals on Yann Martel’s boat are all, it transpires, imaginary: the tiger and the zebra and all the other creatures are fictional creations that Pi makes up, in his great distress, to stand in for real people in a fabricated version of real events which are otherwise too painful for him to deal with at face value.
In order to help himself process and compartmentalise the violence, despair, loss and depravity that he encounters in the aftermath of a disaster at sea, Pi tells himself a story where bad things do not really happen to good people. He decides to control and shape a narrative; he plays God. (If it was explained in the stage version how Pi reconciles his faith with all of these horrendous experiences, including the deaths of his parents and sibling, that bit entirely passed me by.)
Pi is no different to any other story-teller in one crucial respect. Every story comes from someone’s imagination, or is at least conjured up to some extent at someone’s will. Rather than call that someone a writer or an author, let’s instead call them a creator. (Many schools of religious thought already do something similar…) Better still, let’s call this figure an originator.
It would be very easy to point out that, since a story has an originator, since there is someone who is making choices all the time about what characters will say and do, what narrative events will unfold, then there’s never really any potential for the story to go in any direction at any time at all. The originator is an enigmatic and omnipotent force, always shaping that story for us; the story itself is the product of this god-like figure and serves only to confirm the originator’s will — to affirm their order of things.
But I would disagree. That potential for unpredictability is always there. The originator may send a character through this door at a given moment; but they could just as easily have sent them through any of the other doors, or none of them. The originator might present a character with an apple and the character might eat it; but they could just have easily got the character to refuse the apple, to stamp on it, to gift it to someone else, to split it open and plant its seeds, to turn it into apple sauce, to do any number of things with it.
Cinderella could have managed to keep both glass slippers on when she ran away from the ball. Dorothy’s house could have landed ten feet to the right, thus missing the Wicked Witch of the East entirely. Perseus could have decided he was too scared to cut off Medusa’s head and left Princess Andromeda to be eaten by the Kraken. Dennis Nedry could have got to the East Dock and back, despite the storm, in good time to switch the power back on before the T-Rex broke through her fence. And so on, and so on…
The originator is required to make choices continually, about everything from sentence length to punctuation, character names to vocabulary. The whole enterprise of story-telling functions because we as reader/listener/recipient are running behind the originator in a race of understanding, a steeplechase where these choices act like hurdles and pools of water and curves on the track, delaying our arrival at the finish line. (We’re close to aspects of my Golden Apples Theory again here.)
We respond in real time to each of these macro- and micro-choices which the originator has made, as we encounter them. That’s what our experience of the story is founded on, and it’s up to us to do with that what we will. We make our own choice about how to respond to their choices; our response is not determined for us in advance — as anyone who has abandoned a book they weren’t enjoying knows very well…
Equally, as far as the originator’s own choices go, it is not a pre-established fact that any of these things had to be the way they now are. They could have chosen to tell us anything, to write about anything, to decide anything. The story always had the potential to be different, because it is not situated within a framework of an ultimate truth, an ultimate reality, an ultimate definitive version of how the story (and the world) must work.
But then… if we come back to Yann Martel’s approach, to his notion of “a story with God”, immediately we hit a problem.
In such a framework, where “religion doesn’t deny reality, it explains it,” — where God explains it all, and where faith in God explains it all for us — then we have, at a stroke, eliminated any potential for a story to follow an unusual or unpredictable course. The course is now wholly pre-determined; it begins and ends with God.
The only narrative options available are for us to believe in that course, namely, in God, or else not to believe — to suspend our disbelief, or not to suspend it. But, this framework insists, God is still there and still real, even if we personally choose not to suspend our disbelief. So the choice proposed as available to us here is not really any kind of choice at all.
I said earlier that I think a story always has to have the potential to go in any direction at any time, and a story always has to end with the potential to keep on going in other new directions beyond the final full stop. By contrast, a story with God is not, I do not think, a story at all. In narrative terms, it is just one great big full stop.
I can’t imagine anyone opening a book and being pleased or fulfilled to discover that the only thing printed on the paper was this:
.
So, with all respect to Yann Martel, I hear what he’s saying, and I’ll wholeheartedly embrace his first two points, about life being a story, and me being able to choose my story, but when it comes to the third point… well, I’m comfortable choosing the story that feels better for me.
