Review of SELF by Yann Martel

Who are We?

 

What the self is, I should dearly like to know, and I have been attempting to fathom that question for nearly  30 years now.  Whether I am closer to resolving that conundrum now at 54 than when I was 24 is a tough question as the ground seems to keep shifting under me as I get older.  Anyway, I remember sitting in a psychiatric hospital when I was 40 and having been drugged up to the eyeballs by my psychiatrist to relieve a deep depression into which I had fallen, it suddenly occurred to me that not alone was my self very fluid indeed but that I had become merely a psychopharmacological entity.  Previously, I had a notion of a very substantial self, or indeed, a conviction more likely, that I was a very sound and rounded self.  After that experience of hospitalisation, I was never again to be very sure as to who I really was.  Hence, I picked up this novel by Yann Martell.

 

Yann Martell in this novel is no more sure than I am who or what the self is.  The main character in this novel suffers from a shifting sense of self all the time.  Martell is very much in the post-modernist tradition and presents us with what it's like to live in the mind of a person not at all too sure as to what their identity is. 

 

Identity is very much a modern and post-modern concern.  Traditional societies did not spend too much time researching their identities of who they thought they were as individual or unique selves.  My father who was born in 1913 and died in 1993 at the age of 79 belonged firmly to traditional society.  He was a countryman and his identity was rendered and delineated in firm lines - his role as postman in a rural town, his role as father to three sons, his being a spouse to his wife, his reading of a certain newspaper every day, his regular church attendance, his religious beliefs, his cultural beliefs, his circle of friends whom he met every weekend at a given time and place, his customary walks, his customary place of holiday each year and so on.  So, his identity was more or less firmly defined.

 

However, in these post-modern times when we change jobs so often; when we change location so much; when we leave our native countries to start anew; when we are exposed to so much instant information and news; when each of us can travel when and where we will within reason, of course; where each of us is instantly contactable and indeed instantly traceable through modern technology, our identities have become so much more fluid.  We have become, as a result, not at all too sure who we really are, what role we play in life, what we really should be and who we really and essentially are.  We are, in the words of the existentialist philosophers, lost souls, alienated from all real or deep identity.  We are cut adrift on an ocean of meaninglessness, without any firm anchor in the self.

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The structure of this book Self is simple and very post-modernist.  There are only two chapters, the second consisting of only three and a half lines which give us the age, weight, height, hair colour, eye colour, blood type, country of origin and languages the protagonist speaks.  It reads like a police description of a wanted person, except we don't know whether it is a man or a woman.  Indeed, this fact is most central to the book Self (which is very aptly named) because at the beginning of our read, we are introduced to our narrator as obviously male but halfway through he turns into 'she'. This transition is almost seamless as he/she has very much the same voice, and yet as a writing tactic, this is a little ham-fisted, to say the least.  Immediately we are wondering at the sex of our narrator.  Is he or she a transsexual or what?  However, it appears to me as a philosopher that what Martell is getting at here is that identity, while it can be very sexually confused, can also mean something more, something deeper, something that cuts through and below our outward sexual or organic identity.  Indeed, Martell describes the sex scenes in graphic but in very realistic and sensitive terms, and he does so equally well from both the man's and the woman's point of view.  This is no mean creative achievement for any author.

 

The first chapter,  which is essentially the whole novel, is a continuous text without subsections or even chapters.  In this sense, it is rather in the tradition of a stream of consciousness over quite a long period - the lifespan of our narrator.  In sum, it is an artistic exploration of the search for identity in all its existential reality.  As early as page two he spells out the first dawning of his consciousness that he was somebody, a unique existent in the world:

I became aware of a voice inside my head.  What is this, I wondered.  Who are you,  voice? When will you shut up?  I remember a feeling of fright.  It was only later that I realised that this voice was my own thinking, that this moment of anguish was my first inkling that I was a ceaseless monologue trapped within myself. (p. 2)

This novel is set in Canada, Ottawa and Quebec, with passages set side by side in English and French.  As all such passages are translated for us, they do not impinge too forcefully on the reader's pleasure.  There are several pages where two columns exist side by side where the right-hand one just repeats two words over and over again, namely "pain" and "fear" when our protagonist in its female incarnation is savagely raped.  Once again, Martell describes this scene in chilling detail, and here he is at his post-modernist best and most graphic. 

We are brought on a virtual roller coaster of emotions as the protagonist plumbs his/her depths of mind in an attempt to yield up some little vestiges of identity.  No meaning save the sheer living of life is offered to the reader of this rather dispassionate novel, and yet we sense the yearnings for meaning of a real human being, whatever his or her sex, underneath.

This novel is part autobiography and part novel.  Indeed, most writers say that their novels tell as much about themselves as about the world of their characters.  Further, the advice given to most beginning authors is always the same: "Write from your experience, and in that way, your novel or story will be that much more authentic and consequently real.  Readers will know if you're spoofing them!"  That Yann Martel speaks several languages is without doubt, that bilingualism or trilingualism adds to the confusion of identity is also without doubt.  That the writing is sincere and unquestionably makes this a good (but not great) novel.

That Martel has studied philosophy is also without doubt and the pages are full of references not alone to the great philosophers but to their thoughts and ideas, e.g.,

"Why is there pain?" "Why is there existence?" "Why is there a God?" "Why is there anything?" (p.129)

And yet, as a human being, Martell realises that the individual mother of a child who has died asks questions not in an abstract philosophical way but in a deeply human cry of pain, exasperation and despair:

No. Georgie's mother's questions are really statements in disguise.  In asking "Why did Georgie die?" she is saying, "I cannot accept this loss."  In asking "Why is there pain?" she is saying, "It hurts so much."  The statements behind pseudo-questions are usually of fear, pain or bewilderment.  (p. 129)

There is much in this novel to set the reader thinking.  A criticism could be that it is a little too self-aware as a novel, a little too self-consciously structured and crafted, but nonetheless a very moving if disturbing read.  We need such authors to make us think, to shake us out of our complacency.  Martel does just that.  I shall keep this novel on my shelves and return to it for some quotations from time to time.