The contemporary theorist Akira Mizuna Lippitt gave another theory on the relation of man and beast, a theory more informed by the techno-culture of contemporary society. In his book “The Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife,” Lippitt presents an extraordinary idea: animals do not have a language, so they cannot die. Since the animal is unable to understand language, then the animal cannot conceptualize its own death. Lippitt applies this idea to our world, in considering the increased disappearance of the wild animal as a result of human activity; the fleeting animal figure has been transferred to the film image that informs our experience of the wild beast. According to Lippitt, the film image produces an uncanny reproduction of the living in its animation. Lippitt also explains that the image always retains a material connection to the actual creature that was once alive. He goes on to talk about the anxiety felt by a person watching the animal image on-screen and feeling the presence of the moving creature in its filmic form. Arguably then, the wild animal and the technologically enhanced modern civilized human being are still bound together in a digital coexistence. There is an incredibly profound understanding to the significance of the film medium, the representation of the animal figure, our language and what cannot be put into words when we watch an animal image onscreen. Lippitt provides an enlightening scrutiny on the interworking of these ideas. Lippitt’s closely examines the eye of the camera gazing into the eye of the predator and renders the psychological experience of the film viewer in that moment, who senses the impulsive-deathly gaze of the wild animal staring back.  This same experience gets reported on by Pi, in his encounter with wild animals on the boat and the exchange of instinctual gazes.  A cross comparison between the human interpretation of wild life in film and Pi’s own study of the animal’s in their predator-prey interaction, can be performed in a class lesson.

So this brings me to “Life of Pi” in the classroom. The religious pondering in this novel and the close examination of animal-human relations that are creatively combined in this fiction novel touches on the theories of Lippitt.  In a class of adolescents, who have been immersed in a techno-culture world since they can remember, many students will have an experience of wilderness via the electronic image. Therefore they are conditioned to understand the concept of the wild animal in the context of the technology age. I propose that Lippit’s theories get applied to the analysis of Life of Pi during classroom lessons in high schools. Since the high school students have grown-up in a more technologically informed world, they will be able to interpret the complex theories of film theorists such as Lippitt and be able to expand on these concepts, because of their already advanced understanding of the media world. This will give a new potential to the interpretation of Life of Pi through the application of Lippitt’s theories and other film/media theorist by high school students.    

Nature in Literacy and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism. http://books.google.ca/books?id=Bx6raCjQL88C&pg=PA29&dq=Lippitt+Electric+Animal&hl=en&ei=vK6qTLi2Hom8sQOeqajgAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Lippitt%20Electric%20Animal&f=false

http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/L/lippit_electric.html

http://animalvoices.ca/2008/02/12/electric-animal-interview-with-dr-akira-lippit/ (SEE LINK TO LIPPITT INTERVIEW)

In my final year of University, I took an English course on animal signs in literature and media. At the time I thought this was the most bizarre course I had ever come across. I was surprised to find that contemporary literary theory and cinematic theory had for a long time delved into a meticulous philosophical examination of the significance of the animal in human thought. Indeed, the animal has been partly neglected by Western philosophy and religion. Such forms of thought have placed human beings in the centre of existence. Martin Heidegger, an existentialist philosopher throughout the twentieth century, believed that human beings exist in isolation, in a realm of language, separated by an abyss of disconnect from all living things.
Since we access Pi’s experience through language, his experience of the approach of death becomes very different than the animals’ experience of death on the life boat. According to Heidegger, animals cannot die, they can only perish and so we have denied animals the experience of death, not only in Western philosophy and religion, but simply due to the fact that they are unable to conceptualize death from a lack of intellect and higher language capability. It seems fitting that in a novel that addresses religious questions, particularly the Christian religion which denies the animal a significance, Pi’s character then illustrates how the human experience neglects to give the same experience to animals in the moment of death.
Perhaps I am wrong about this though. Could the bizarre circumstances of a young religious boy trapped on a life boat with predatory animals, finally allow for the proper acknowledgement of the animals experience of death, rather than a simple perishing from predation or starvation. Arguably, Orange Juices’s death comes close to the human experience, especially since the monkey resembles the human so closely, as a genetic relative. (Juice’s death gets compared to Jesus’s crucifixion!) The Hyenas last moment before being killed by the Tiger gets captured in Pi’s narrative and Pi describes the look of fear on the face of the Hyena. We of course do not get inside the experience of the Hyena though, because we are outside the animal experience of reality that does not exist in our realm of language. Subsequently, Pi’s fear of death is only ever what concerns the reader. This applies again to what Heidegger believed and that was that humans carry around the burden of an awareness of mortality throughout life and therefore this is a part of the human experience of death, not able to be experienced by animals, since animals cannot contemplate their death. Pi’s own contemplation of death gets experienced by the reader in detail, with his constant description of fear and encroaching danger. Are the other animals actually aware of their immortality in their final moments? Is this conveyed in the narrative? In other words, is there a possible animal experience of a death made accessible, in some way, through Pi’s narrative?