Non-Human Animals and Liminal Cultural Space in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and Victor Pelevin’s The Life of Insects

Abstract

The two texts that are the main concern of this essay - Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi, Canadian winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize, and the prominent contemporary Russian writer Viktor Pelevin’s post-Soviet novel The Life of Insects (1993) - posit a number of questions about the limits and extensions of the spaces of humanity and animality in their relation to language, representation, and reality. Arguably, both texts, although very different in their narrative modes and styles, represent an exploration of a relation between human and non-human bioforms as contained within - and by - narrativity, and, more significantly, of implications of this ambivalent relation for a post-historical world.