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Archival Legends: National Myth and Transnational Memory in the Works of Michael Ondaatje

Aarthi Vadde

in Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914-2016

The chimera of form featured in my fourth chapter is the archival legend, which I use to classify Billy the Kid and Sailor from Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970; extended ... More

The chimera of form featured in my fourth chapter is the archival legend, which I use to classify Billy the Kid and Sailor from Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970; extended reissue, 2008) and Anil’s Ghost (2000) respectively. Combining theories of the archive as a space of material collection and artifactual remains and theories of the legend as a genre of storytelling that cultivates the unreal and the unknowable, I argue that Ondaatje uses archival legends to broach the tensions between isolationism and internationalism, cultural particularity and the universal norms of justice associated with human rights. While some critics have argued that Ondaatje’s collage aesthetics are irresponsible and compound injustice because they obscure the cause and effect of historicist narratives (a criticism that will recall for many Georg Lukács’ famous disregard for modernism), this chapter shows that Ondaatje’s work subjects the norms of both international justice and historicist causality to criticism for being inadequately sensitive to cultural memory. Rejecting both the disembodying abstractions of human rights dicta and the embodying practices of historical identification, he uses archival legends as figure of semi-embodiment brought into being by formal strategies of artifact collection, fragment accretion, and loose assembly. These legends situate universal norms and historical facts within the foggier, but actually-existing realms of national myth and transnational memory. Without attending to these dominant and emergent domains of cultural memory, Ondaatje suggests that internationalism forsakes the domain of sentiment and risks becoming tone deaf to the cosmological gaps that persist in how members of “strong” versus “weak” nations view colonialism’s impact on the global present.Less

Expeausition: Ondaatje’s Skin-Effects

Sarah Jackson

in Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing

Developing Didier Anzieu's account of the skin as a palimpsest that preserves traces of experience inscribed on its surface, this chapter reads the ‘palimpsestuous’ quality of Michael Ondaatje's ... More

Developing Didier Anzieu's account of the skin as a palimpsest that preserves traces of experience inscribed on its surface, this chapter reads the ‘palimpsestuous’ quality of Michael Ondaatje's work. Discussing his novels In The Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, it reads the co-implication of the body and the text as a means of mapping aesthetic movement and form. The chapter argues that in disrupting the conventions of the realist novel, Ondaatje presents a textual skin that is both mobile and mutable. Comparing this skin to Michel Serres's discussion of the syrrhèse or a cloud of dust, it suggests that Ondaatje's ‘tactile poetics’ demand a different mode of reading. Rather than focusing on the motif of inscription in Ondaatje's work, this chapter employs Jean-Luc Nancy's theory of exscription in order to interrogate the traces that are ‘inscribed-outside’ the text. Reading the skin-effects of Ondaatje's work, it demonstrates that language is subject to its own expeausition.Less

Michael Ondaatje Tricks the Eye

Alice Brittan

in Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism: Anglophone Literature, 1950 to the Present

Focusing on In the Skin of a Lion (1987), The English Patient (1992), and The Cat’s Table (2011), this chapter examines Ondaatje’s modernist, indeed Conradian, engagement with the unreliability of ... More

Focusing on In the Skin of a Lion (1987), The English Patient (1992), and The Cat’s Table (2011), this chapter examines Ondaatje’s modernist, indeed Conradian, engagement with the unreliability of individual cognition and subjective impression. Ondaatje’s characters typically fail to recognize their view of the world depends on acts of “enframing.” Blindness to their situated perspectives leaves them vulnerable to political violence and social injustice, including colonialism and imperialism. The chapter argues that the modernist lesson is that perception is always a game of frames, so the eye needs to keep seeking the edge. The postcolonial lesson is that an eye that does not move becomes complicit with nationalism and empire building. Ondaatje’s efforts to look more closely at the hidden mechanisms that shape social life represent his attempt to apply the formal and thematic concerns of modernism to the politics of colonialism and the challenges of global modernity.Less

The Dead that Haunt Anil’s Ghost: Subaltern Stereotypes and Postcolonial Melancholia

Mrinalini Chakravorty

in In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary

This chapter examines Michael Ondaatje's novel, The Dead that Haunt Anil's Ghost, to address the stereotypical portrayal of violence and death in South Asia. The novel employs the Sri Lankan civil ... More

This chapter examines Michael Ondaatje's novel, The Dead that Haunt Anil's Ghost, to address the stereotypical portrayal of violence and death in South Asia. The novel employs the Sri Lankan civil war as a staging ground for probing some of the paradoxes that arise in postcolonial fictions. Such narratives deal with stereotypes about death that are moored to a particular place and real events. The idea that this work advances—that life elsewhere is inherently insecure—redirects salient notions about the value of human life appraised through a dominant human rights framework. Also, the concept of death in Anil's Ghost demands that readers relinquish settled notions of how humans understand finitude and entanglements with the deaths of others, as well as ascribe meaning to death itself.Less

Travelling with the Ondaatje Bros.

in Mobility at Large: Globalization, Textuality and Innovative Travel Writing

This chapter compares Christopher Ondaatje's conventional travel narrative The Man Eater of Punanai and his brother Michael Ondaatje's experimental travel text Running in the Family. It analyzes how ... More

This chapter compares Christopher Ondaatje's conventional travel narrative The Man Eater of Punanai and his brother Michael Ondaatje's experimental travel text Running in the Family. It analyzes how the Ondaatje brothers translated their similar journeys to Sri Lanka into intricate palimpsests of texts and voices. It suggests that both texts illustrate how textuality interlocks with globalization and travel and contends that while they share common genealogies and thematic concerns, they employ radically different textual strategies.Less

Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison

in The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature

This chapter examines Theodor Adorno's dialectical approach to semblance and subjectivity to theorize the role of comparison in Asian American Studies. It offers a reading of Anil's Ghost (2000), a ... More

This chapter examines Theodor Adorno's dialectical approach to semblance and subjectivity to theorize the role of comparison in Asian American Studies. It offers a reading of Anil's Ghost (2000), a novel by Sri Lankan Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje and argues that its depiction of shame as the effect/affect of aesthetic representation illustrates the ethical challenges of literary representation in a global context. Anil's Ghost is a complex novel because it is not concerned with either Canada or the United States. Instead, it conveys the so-called “embeddedness” of the South Asian diaspora in the three ideologies that have shaped global modernity: capitalism, colonialism, and nationalism. This chapter sets aside the comparison of national differences in favor of a diasporic approach that underscores the knowledge politics of globality. It also shows how identity politics fails to resolve the underlying conflicts in Anil's Ghost.Less

Echo

John Mowitt

in Sounds: The Ambient Humanities

This chapter presents a reading of Michael Ondaatje's text on the birth of jazz, Coming through Slaughter, to examine the structure and logic of the echo. Ostensibly a “bio-text” on the jazz ... More

This chapter presents a reading of Michael Ondaatje's text on the birth of jazz, Coming through Slaughter, to examine the structure and logic of the echo. Ostensibly a “bio-text” on the jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden, this study is also a sustained, high-pitched meditation on what it means to situate a musical sound in a sociohistorical context. The syntactic structure of the text—including the relay between story and plot, the past and present of narration—could be said to be structured like an echo. This means not only that the text's beginning and end echo one another, but that Ondaatje's text, at a metafictional level, understands itself as the echo of its source material, some of which is charged with the authority of oral history. In Coming through Slaughter, Ondaatje invites readers to ponder the relationship between cetaceans, language, and music. It is also important to recognize that his ontology insists that this relation is echoed “all the way down.”Less

Narrating Sensation: Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

Ridvan Askin

in Narrative and Becoming

The second chapter traces in detail how Ondaatje’s text engages in what Askin terms disfiguration—the very process of disfiguring its representational surface both in terms of content and form—in ... More

The second chapter traces in detail how Ondaatje’s text engages in what Askin terms disfiguration—the very process of disfiguring its representational surface both in terms of content and form—in order to unearth its constitutive sensations. Disfiguration makes tangible what otherwise remains intangible, the very constitution and genesis of actual narratives from virtual sensations. In The Collected Works of Billy the Kid disfiguration is most prominently on display in a series of becomings the protagonist undergoes culminating in his metaleptic account of his own death where his brain breaks apart and thus literally kills off representation. It is in staging such acute moments of representational crisis that the narrative reaches the impersonal and nonhuman beyond of personal and human experience. By the same token the beyond of actual narratives is attained: the sensations and forces that make up the death of Billy are those that make up the narrative at hand in so far as it is the narrative that assembles and composes the figure of Billy. It is thus that The Collected Works of Billy the Kid can be said to be a Deleuzian monument of sensation.Less

Major Authors: Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje

Coral Ann Howells

in The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 12: The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific Since 1950

This chapter discusses the works of three Canadian novelists best known internationally: Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje. The careers of Davies, Atwood, and Ondaatje, although ... More

This chapter discusses the works of three Canadian novelists best known internationally: Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje. The careers of Davies, Atwood, and Ondaatje, although overlapping chronologically, represent distinctive stages in Canada's evolving cultural traditions and publishing practices since the 1950s. Davies's novels signal the first stage in a transition from colonial to postcolonial identity in post-war Canada. Atwood in the 1970s provided the script for a Canadian cultural and literary identity separate from British and American in what Carol Shields called ‘a period of explosive patriotism’. Ondaatje's novels and family memoir epitomize the ‘refocusing and defocusing’ of Canadian literature since the 1980s, coinciding with the nation's shifts into multiculturalism and transnationalism. The chapter first provides a background on Davies, Atwood, and Ondaatje's careers before considering some of their works, including the Deptford trilogy (Davies), The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood), and The English Patient (Ondaatje).Less

Invisible Victims, Visible Absences

Joanne Lipson Freed

in Haunting Encounters: The Ethics of Reading across Boundaries of Difference

Chapter 3 explores the haunting traces that remain in the wake of political disappearance in the novel Anil’s Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje, and the American film Missing (1982), directed by ... More

Chapter 3 explores the haunting traces that remain in the wake of political disappearance in the novel Anil’s Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje, and the American film Missing (1982), directed by Costa-Gavras. Although ostensibly dedicated to recovering the identities of individual victims, both works ultimately subordinate the mimetic particularity of these individuals to their larger thematic projects, insuring their enduring relevance long after the conflicts they depict have been consigned to history. While these thematic frameworks allow these works to become meaningful—and ethically consequential—beyond the particular contexts that inspire them, they also exclude entire categories of victims from the compass of their recuperative efforts.Less

In Near Ruins: Cultural Theory at the End of the Century

Nicholas B. Dirks

in Autobiography of an Archive: A Scholar's Passage to India

This chapter examines the state of cultural theory at the end of the twentieth century. It begins by considering Michael Ondaatje's 1993 novel The English Patient, which the protagonist is the ... More

This chapter examines the state of cultural theory at the end of the twentieth century. It begins by considering Michael Ondaatje's 1993 novel The English Patient, which the protagonist is the exemplar of colonial knowledge and the epitome of colonial adventure. The chapter then discusses the notion of ruin in relation to culture and civilization, along with the argument between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno over popular and elite culture. In particular, it analyzes Adorno's commitment to the critical potential of high modernist aesthetics and his despair about mass culture. In conclusion, he argues that the postcolonial condition is the historical precipitate of centuries of Western political and economic domination, itself enabling, even as it was enabled by, centuries of cultural and intellectual colonization.Less

Undivided Loyalty: The Problem of Allegiance in the Literature of War

Alison L. LaCroix and William A. Birdthistle

in Cannons and Codes: Law, Literature, and America's Wars

Alison LaCroix and William Birdthistle examine two works: Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way (2005) and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992), which was made into a film, directed by Anthony ... More

Alison LaCroix and William Birdthistle examine two works: Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way (2005) and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992), which was made into a film, directed by Anthony Minghella, in 1996. Both novels challenge traditional notions of loyalty in wartime. Although they focus on different wars—Barry on World War I, Ondaatje on World War II—the novels raise a pair of related, crucial questions: Loyalty to what and to whom? The books interrogate the meaning of national sovereignty in an age of empire or imperial decline, as their characters confront law in personal ways. Barry’s novel holds out a slim hope that the birth of the Irish Republic might make comprehensible, even if not justify, the bloodbaths of the Western Front. Ondaatje, however, challenges the primacy of nations, suggesting instead that personal loyalties or regional ties provide the only meaningful connections for individuals uprooted by modern global warfare. Both novels thus force their characters to negotiate an overlapping series of boundaries: local and national political lines, as well as ethnic, familial, and emotional borders.Less