The Art of Looking Back

Four books by Michael Ondaatje discussed in this essay:

In the contemporary literary imagination, few authors can claim to have the immediate emotive responses to their work as Canadian Michael Ondaatje. Influencing other contemporary Canadian poets-turned-writers such as Anne Simpson, Patrick Lane and Priscilla Uppal, Ondaatje is widely recognized for epic yet intimate storytelling, lyrical and poetic prose, and the ability to connect the geographies of the past and present. Mastering in dense, intimate narratives that interweave the reverberations of individual actions and stories amid the greater forces of communal history, his novels seek to answer questions that are as timeless as they are relevant in contemporary society: how can we move on from trauma without forgetting? How can each life and each story be sanctified, or be made whole once it has been smashed? What does it mean to be human, to love and to lose, and what can be gained out of loss?

While Ondaatje has published several novels, most notably In the Skin of a Lion, The English Patient, Anil’s Ghost and his most recent work Divisadero, his central ideas have remained consistent and have been deepened and amplified in each successive work. A true poet at heart, his novels find their genesis in vivid, startling images that bleed and bloom into full-length narratives. The images of a nun falling off a half-completed bridge in In the Skin of a Lion; the burnt convalescent Almasy, his image and identity literally erased by flames in The English Patient; a Buddhist statue painstakingly reconstructed in Anil’s Ghost; and sisters caught in a barn with a frightened horse amid a violent thunderstorm in Divisadero are some of the central images associated with Ondaatje’s works. These visualizations are the cornerstone for Ondaatje’s trenchant, powerful explorations of the contradictions and duality of the human condition. Where earlier works such as The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) and Coming Through Slaughter (1976) were dark, often disturbing retellings of the downward spiral of real historical lives, riveting and raw yet difficult to digest, the fictive work containing the origin of his main arguments is often regarded as In the Skin of a Lion.

A fascinating exploration of the immigrant experience in the industrial boom of Canadian society, Ondaatje painstakingly and magically tells the story of the labors of the unrecognized and uncelebrated working class that made Toronto the city it is today. It is here that readers first glimpse two of Ondaatje’s most beloved characters, the young Hana and the charming, traveling thief Caravaggio, both of whom return in Ondaatje’s masterpiece, The English Patient.

In the Skin of a Lion presents the reader with Ondaatje’s central project: to tell the story of the marginal, the archival, the unrecorded; to shed light on the subjectivity of the outsider with an intimacy and warmth that is unmatched. It is in this novel that we learn the fate of characters such as Patrick, Clara, Hana and Nicholas Temelcoff, and it is often with this poignant and powerful novel that a reader’s enduring love affair with Ondaatje begins.

It is with this theme of enduring love, although in a very different form, that we move from the city lights of Canada to the deserts of Africa and the war-torn Villa San Girolamo in The English Patient. Moving between different voices, viewpoints and writing styles, the novel maps and traces the tragic romance between the English patient, the Count Ladislaus de Almasy, and his beautiful lover, Katherine Clifton. While Ondaatje tells Almasy’s tale of cartography, exploration and eventual betrayal, the patient reads to his nurse and caregiver Hana about his travels and experiences in various locations.

Creating a scrapbook of his own favorite moments, readings and writings, palimpsestically imposed on The Histories by Herodotus, Almasy (and by implication, Ondaatje) engages in a metaphysical and metafictional reading and writing project that inserts the particular and personal into the political, the individual story into the representation and recording of history. This shows how storytelling and narrative can embed the subjectivity of individuals and the collective into a real and fictional landscape that successfully blurs the divisions between art and life, fact and fiction. Clearly a meditation on the nature of writing, reading and narrative as much as an impassioned, sensuous exploration of character and the search for community, The English Patient brings characters together from all corners of the globe: an Indian sapper, Kip; a Canadian nurse and thief, Hana and Caravaggio; the Hungarian count Almasy; and the British Katherine Clifton. The English Patient is heart wrenching and endlessly evocative in its haunting portrayal of forbidden love, its exploration of the spaces of the garden, church, desert and the human body. In its vision of humanity as constituted by interconnected subjects, bound like pages in a book by communal stories, Ondaatje resolutely connects the author figure to the real world and the suggestive space of the fictional, breaking boundaries between experience and representation.

Like a magic carpet, the novel sweeps the reader away to various topographies, both physical and emotional, and maps the way forward for Ondaatje’s next novel, Anil’s Ghost, a profoundly dense work that uncovers the dark heart of the Sri Lankan civil war through a returning forensic scientist, Anil Tissera. After being educated abroad, Anil returns after many years to investigate the government killings taking place. As with Ondaatje’s previous novels, the larger social setting and events become a backdrop for the examination of physical and emotional dislocation, of characters uprooted from their everyday lives, forced to come to terms with their isolation, loss and grief. As Anil comes into contact with others that have experienced the war directly and indirectly, like the doctor Gamini, the archaeologist Sarath, epigraphist Palipana, and artificer Ananda in her quest to find the truth, Ondaatje investigates the discourses of forensic science, archaeology, history and medicine, coupled with an absorbing murder mystery and an enthralling excavation of human subjectivity. While the novel deals with the most brutal of human cruelty and random violence, Ondaatje juxtaposes its evocation of senseless horror with the ethical response of human kindness and the importance of touch and recognition, the beauty found in everyday connection to others and the physical world, and the importance of storytelling to consecrate and honor every loss, no matter how large or insignificant it may seem.

At the end of Anil’s Ghost, Anil makes a return to her new home in the United States, from where Ondaatje’s most recent novel, Divisadero, is launched. A remarkable yet challenging novel that has had most critics divided over its complex plot structure and insistence on a second reading and re-viewing, the novel traces the life of two young girls, Anna and Claire, brought together by the death of a mother, who are eventually torn apart by their shared love of an adopted brother and farmhand, Coop, and an overprotective father who nearly beats Coop to death when witnessing Anna and Coop together in a moment of passion. After this traumatic event, the lives of Anna, Claire and Coop separate yet remain intimately connected through the gateway of memory and remembering. While the novel begins in the heart of American corn country, it traces the passage of time and symbolic journey undertaken by the two sisters, in particular Anna, who share the narration of the different narrative strands with Ondaatje. We are given the individual stories of both Claire and Coop, but the novel is most concerned with Anna’s story, her imaginative recollection of her own experiences, and how her investigation into the life and times of a French author, Lucien Segura, mirrors her own life-path and choices. The novel’s title is indicative of its fragmented form and narrative division, its root in the Latin divisar which, by Ondaatje’s interpretation, means both a literal division and to gaze at something from a distance. The novel is both a synthesis of his previous novels, and a crystallization of his style and recurrent motifs and ideas.

While the theme of blindness and vision is central to all the Ondaatje texts, Divisadero is emblematic of the profound duality and contradictions which Ondaatje believes is inherent in the human condition. It not only traces the splintering of narrative and personhood, but explores the central, mutually inclusive paradoxes of creation and destruction, distance and intimacy, presence and absence, loss and healing, separation and connection that are the hallmarks of each of Ondaatje’s stories. While creating a constellation of texts that meditate on the process of narrative craft, Ondaatje encourages the reader to see between the lines, to find the story in history, to hear the voice of the voiceless, to contemplate on the reflections between art and life, to discover what divides, defines, and unites us. While the reader travels on emotive journeys with many flawed—yet resolutely humane characters—Ondaatje maps the geographies of artistic creation and the search for meaning in art and in life. With a simultaneous global and intimate focus that exposes trans-historical connections and divisions, his work is postcolonial and postmodern, political and personal. In a body of work as diverse as it is distinctive, we have discovered an author that has made an art out of looking back, into the pain of the past and to the hopeful promise of the future.

January 24, 2010

frontispiece: Michael Ondaatje, photo credit this is 606