The Good Ship Lollipop (Tsimtsum)
For Sitaram, the most significant single aspect of “Life of Pi” is the name of the Japanese cargo ship, “Tsimtsum.”
Among thousands of URLs returned by Google on a search of “Life of Pi” and Tsimtsum, only a very few directly discuss the significance of the name Tsimtsum.
http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/di...=9780676973778
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tsimtsum
"Japanese Cargo ship Tsimtsum" - Chapter 35 page 90 - "The concept of Tsimtsum is a 16th century kabbalistic explanation of how God, if infinite and omnipresent, could form a material world. God contracted Itself into Itself - Tsimtsum - bringing into being a vacuum in which to create something OTHER than Itself" - Yann Martel's naming of the ship in which Pi loses his family seems to be another nod at the cosmogony of the Book of Genesis.
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Just as God had to withdraw to create the cosmos, so the Tsimtsum sinks. By using this name of Tsimtsum, does Yann Martel mean to suggest that God has effectively absented himself from Pi's struggle, and that this is the ultimate test of Pi's faith? "This paradox of Tsimtsum -- as Jacob Emden said -- is the only serious attempt ever made to give substance to the idea of Creation out of Nothing. Incidentally, the fact that an idea which as first sight appears so reasonable as "Creation out of Nothing" should turn out upon inspection to lead to a theosophical mystery shows us how illusory the apparent simplicity of religious fundamentals really is.
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But does Pi separate from the 'primordial universe' or does he, in fact, join with it? As Ephraim Carmel writes, Yann Martel would not be the first author in English to grasp the concept of tsimtsum in order to write of 'Paradise Lost' -
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I believe that the concept of Tsimtsum also plays a major role in how Yann Martel has structured Life of Pi. There is something very circular in telling Pi's story in exactly 100 chapters. Also, when Pi uses pi to work out the circumference of that strange anti-Eden he lands on, you can't help but acknowledge that there is some great deal of thought in Yann Martel's naming of Pi, since pi is synonymous with circles. When God creates his vacuum, one can only imagine a circular shaped hole. Galaxies certainly resolve around black holes.
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An ancient Indian poet Tulsi Das, rewriting the oldest of stories, and one of the best, the Ramayana ,adds this "the gods themselves live by forbearance"... they live by drawing back.
And so it is written of Jesus in Philippians that he "took on himself the form of a servant..." The Greek word Kenosis or self-emptying can parallel the Tsimstsum and perhaps each word enriches the other a little. Unfortunately few people have set them together! But you and I may today and see therefore the sign of the cross on the creation of the world itself, and then the cross as no isolated moment
but the heart of a deep mystery of creation-by-making-space.
Into that space which God made, light entered... and from the light came all the worlds and all the persons and you and I...
http://www.24hourscholar.com/p/artic...40/ai_84182763
http://www.powells.com/fromtheauthor/martel.html
http://www.readinggroupguides.com/gu...ife_of_pi1.asp
http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/di...=9780676973778
Quote:
Originally Posted by Author Yann Martel
As Yann Martel has said in one interview, “The theme of this novel can be summarized in three lines. Life is a story. You can choose your story. And a story with an imaginative overlay is the better story.” And for Martel, the greatest imaginative overlay is religion. “God is a shorthand for anything that is beyond the material -- any greater pattern of meaning.” In Life of Pi, the question of stories, and of what stories to believe, is front and centre from the beginning, when the author tells us how he was led to Pi Patel and to this novel: in an Indian coffee house, a gentleman told him, “I have a story that will make you believe in God.” And as this novel comes to its brilliant conclusion, Pi shows us that the story with the imaginative overlay is also the story that contains the most truth.
From Pi one gleans that faith -- one of the most ephemeral emotions, yet crucial whenever life is one the line -- is rooted in the will to live.
http://www.randomhouse.ca/newface/martel.php
"A storyteller, in order to enchant, must lie, and then must convince us that he is not lying. This novel is all about storytelling."
http://books.guardian.co.uk/bookerpr...794491,00.html
http://www.americamagazine.org/BookR...31&issueID=430
http://www.theverandah.net/verandah/article.asp?id=130
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Nook/1...rtel_page.html
