Fragile Bodies, Cross-species Empathy and Suspended Allegories: ‘It hurt, it was painful – that’s all there is to say’
This chapter focuses on Yann Martel’s allegorical novels Life of Pi and Beatrice and Virgil in order to assess the possibility of articulating cross-species vulnerability and its connection to cross-species empathy, where empathy is understood as imaginative perspective-taking. Engaging with theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Carey Wolfe and Anat Pick, it argues that Martel resists the temptation to reinstate the human as master-storyteller. Instead, it identifies an ironic or deconstructive approach to storytelling in Martel’s fiction, which shuttles between critique (stories tend towards the reactionary reiteration of the familiar) and affirmation (stories promise imaginative innovation which enables ‘reworlding’). Taking seriously the possibility of nonhuman storytelling, the chapter closes by proposing ways in which alternative modes of storytelling might ground an inhuman ethics.
