I chose a passage from page 19 of the Picador edition:
“It was strange for Patrick to realize later that he had learned important things, the way children learn from watching how adults angle a hat or approach a strange dog. He knew how much a piece of dynamite the size of a bullfrog could destroy. But he absorbed everything from a distance”.
Canada’s history and Canadian historical writing are mainly concerned with the self-representation of the nation and the individual. Being a settler colony, Canada is inhabited by immigrants with different languages, cultures, knowledge and ideologies. The problem of self-definition and articulation is a prominent issue in Canadian history and literature. Due to their different social background settlers and their descendents are constantly challenged by the social reality and culture that surrounds them in their new homeland. Even though most immigrants have settled in Canada already a long time ago they still struggle to identify themselves with the dominant culture. Trying to adapt to other ideologies and beliefs is a long process which needs much effort and time. Finding a definition of oneself embraces of course not only the dominant history but also one’s own. Thus, it is not only about adaptation to and adoption of native social culture but as well about defining oneself in one’s own traditional terms. The problem of finding one’s individual identity is very well represented in the character of Patrick Lewis. That is why I chose the above quoted passage from In the Skin of a Lion. In this passage the reader is allowed a very explicit insight into the experience and construction of Patrick’s self.
Patrick can be said to have to cope with a double obstacle in trying to define his own identity: not only is he a child of a family from rural Canada but additionally he is a little boy growing up and starting to discover his own personal reality. On the one hand, being from a little village in the countryside, he has to face the conflicts between dominant (urban) history and his (rural) own. He has to experience what it means to be part of a minority; what it means to be ignored and despised by others even though this minority is part of Canadian reality and in fact cannot be erased.
On the other hand, in the passage selected, Patrick is still a little boy who is trying to find his own way in the world. A crucial part of constructing one’s personal identity is one’s family and the processes of growing up and learning within this personal surrounding. This process is hinted at in the passage. Patrick never consciously realised that he had learned something from his father. This is mainly due to the fact that his father never really spoke to anyone which alludes to the struggle of a minority to discover their voices. Nevertheless, some time later, he becomes aware of all the important things that his father had taught him in all the year. Metaphorically speaking, this shows that it is still possible to adapt to a new surrounding because, unconsciously or not, one culture does always adopt something from the other (dominant) culture. This is even possible when the two social realities are quite different from each other because also Patrick had picked up his father’s lessons event though “he absorbed everything from a distance”.
“It is 1930. The cut of the shovel into clay is all Patrick sees digging into the brown slippery darkness. He feels the whole continent in front of him. They dig underneath one of the largest lakes in
This is the scene where Patrick is working on the tunnel under
The men labour to realise the aesthetic design of Commissioner Harris, referred to by his grand title in this passage; while the men are contrasted as mere frenetic ‘shadows’, racing to their task. This choice of words reflects Ondaatje’s view throughout the novel that identity is changeable, and his recognition that entire groups of people can be subsumed beneath a more ‘worthy’ and well-known figurehead in the interest of providing a clean-cut objective history.
The men digging the tunnels are given the inglorious label of ‘muckers’, seeking to fulfil what is referred to as a ‘mad scheme’. Of course, it is actually a crucial project in the history of
When speaking of the muckers’ fear of being engulfed by the water from the
Patrick and his fellow workers are unified in their silence towards the ‘bronco foremen’. Ondaatje casts the foremen with the Canadian slang for ‘feral horses’, drawing a line between the labourers and their superiors. I think this is important, because in analysing Ondaatje’s work, it is easy to be captivated by the things he has to say about
This intention addresses, but necessarily transcends nationality; when dealing with unheard voices, class becomes a more important issue than race. So Patrick is united with his peers in this passage, because of their shared burden of being at the bottom of the ladder – as Ondaatje terms it through Patrick’s 
eyes, being ‘banished from the world’, an exile in the tunnel.
The historical research which Ondaatje invests in the novel, evident from his varied list of sources, stands as testament to his interest in making these unheard voices credible. In this respect Ondaatje reminds me of the writer and journalist David Simon, who explored the subcultures of the crime-ravaged city of
Similarly, Ondaatje said in an interview with Hutcheon, ‘I am more interested in making people as believable and complex as possible, than in (just) making an argument’. Both writers make a key distinction; while making an argument is important, and factual accuracy is imperative, historical detail is to be used sparingly; just enough to give us a palpable sense of the character’s world, and sympathise with the people of the time. But not so much that it overwhelms the human drama, as this would defuse the ex-centric element of the novels.
Rather than submerge us with details of the landscape of the tunnel excavation, or blunt historical facts, Ondaatje aims to make the environment tangible. He does not flinch from representing the unpleasant conditions which the ‘muckers’ work. They ‘piss where they work’; they ‘slip in wet clay’. Ondaatje ensures we can identify with the kind of lives the muckers are leading, in order to stay true to the experience of that group of people at that time in history.
It is interesting that in their efforts, the muckers seem to merge with the materials of the tunnel – they are covered with ‘wet clay’, they endure ‘blackened faces’ - until their identity submerges into their work and they are digested by the process of their labour. This is a dehumanisation because history does not acknowledge the process – it presents only the finished product. In a wider sense, Ondaatje suggests that the ‘objective, definitive’ picture of events that is presented by history, is simply not compatible with the way our identities and stories are actually built – we can see this throughout ‘In the Skin of a Lion’, in the way Patrick constructs his own story out of scraps of memory.
This passage opens with city photographer Arthur Goss taking a picture of the workers. This is how it is captured in history; their ‘dirt-streaked faces’ neatly recorded as a curiosity, a snapshot of life, yet for the workers this is their grim and plodding daily reality. Beginning the passage with this cursory visit from a photographer is Ondaatje’s way of showing us how trivial the documented, mainstream record of history is, in that it fails to exhaustively capture the detail which forms the body and soul of vital subcultures.
I picked a passage from pg. 107 of the Picador:
‘Although he dynamites for the foreman, most of the time Patrick works with the muckers in the manual digging. He is paid extra for each of the charges laid. Nobody else wants the claustrophobic uncertainty, but for Patrick this part is the only ease in this terrible place where he feels banished from the world. He carries out the old skill he learned from his father – although then it had been in sunlight, in rivers, logs rumbling over themselves slowly in the air.’
I’d be lying if I said this was my first choice (thanks Mike), but as a second choice, I chose this passage for its applicability to Patrick’s role in the fiction, as well as providing a nice example of Ondaatje’s skilful prose.
The juxtaposed images of Patrick’s current situation, ‘banished’ to the mines, extradited from his nostalgia-soaked memories, are connected through this ‘claustrophobic uncertainty’. By copying his father’s past actions – carrying out ‘the old skill’ – by laying and detonating explosives, Patrick binds the past and present. Ondaatje also commands imagery of lightness and darkness as binders between the past/present divide. Light appears to be both a constructive and a destructive force. In this paragraph, it seems to demonstrate the creative illumination of memories - but these are memories of destruction. Darkness is also simultaneously determined to be both a banishing force and a haven for Patrick’s memories. The claustrophobic, poorly-lit confines of the tunnel emphasise the freedom and wide-open spaces of his romanticised childhood, constructed through Ondaatje’s poetic combination of light, water and air. But the explosives have the same destructive effect, no matter how poetic an environment, and both Patrick and his father employ this destruction for aiding construction, ultimately benefitting those with better socio-political footing. Perhaps that’s a little too Marxist.
This ‘claustrophobic uncertainty’ could be seen to echo historical uncertainty. Bearing in mind that the majority of workers involved in the mining project are immigrants, their facelessness, their absence of description, demonstrates the inherent linearity of postmodern works of literature. Communities still remain silenced, or their histories are recycled through others (e.g. Cato). Ondaatje recognises the complications of moving from a national to a social history, understanding that it is not a problem simply resolved by constructing voices for these societies: in reality, individuals resist such rigid stereotyping. However, I feel Ondaatje's ideas stretch beyond this point to discuss the complications of constructing individuality. Only the exceptional individual, as embodied in Patrick, that exists outside these communities has any real chance of constructing extra-cultural individualism. But there are jarring absences in his own genetic history that are silenced by Ondaatje – appearing more evident when contrasted to their vociferous treatment in Macleod's fiction – that emphasise the non-realist fabrication of Patrick.
Patrick exists as a construct to bridge the gap between the silenced past and present. He has very much existed alongside the strong cultural identity of the immigrant communities, as a spectator of their ways. As a child, he functions as an onlooker intrigued by the other – which he later discovers to be Finnish ice-skaters. As an adult, his socio-political positioning forces him out of woodland insularity and into the throbbing immigrant communities. The adoption of a lingua franca – part-gesture, part-limited vocabulary – leads to increased association and awareness of these communities and their distinctive cultural heritages. Through Patrick, Ondaatje could be seen as gesturing towards a potential Canadian identity, constructed in terms of the immigrant communities – but an identity that he understands to be inevitably unreachable.
The passage I have chosen to discuss is the opening of ‘The Searcher’, p. 55-6 describing Patrick’s initial arrival in
I thought the novel in general interesting in it’s inversion of the usual immigrant story. In Ondaatje’s novel, Patrick (The Canadian) is the outsider when he arrives to the bustling city. Ondaatje is explicit in this with this: “He was an immigrant to the city” (55) Rather than the journey being between two different countries and cultures, it is between country and city, which are still arguably two different cultures. The passage juxtaposes the two cultures as Patrick’s past and Patrick’s present/future. This idea, I think, is summed up in the image of the ‘feldspar in his pocket’ – the country life literally behind him, tucked away in the back pocket of his memory, or as Ondaatje puts it on the following page, “the past locked away”(56).
For Patrick coming to the big city is the start of a new life, and also a new man “Now, in the city, he was new even to himself.” Patrick experiences a sense of liberty at having left his old world behind, “drawn out from that small town…to begin his life once more” (55). Ondaatje treats this wide-eyed optimism with just a hint of derision; Patrick’s initial impression of Union Station is rather over-the-top, imagining it a “palace” before thinking that now, in this “intimate city” he can do all sorts of things like eating a meal or having a shave (things he could, of course, have done perfectly well before). He is a naïve young man, caught up in the awe of a new, exciting place.
However, it doesn’t take long for the illusion to fade for Patrick, and by the end of the passage he is no longer feeling like a ‘new’ Patrick, but is more like a ‘lost’ Patrick. The Shouting Man in Union Station can be interpreted as a shadowy manifestation of Patrick’s own fears and feelings. Like Patrick, he is an immigrant. He is shouting in a language that nobody understands or listens to, and Patrick discovers the same things when he calls out his own name only to have it lost in the “high air”. The Shouting Man is still there two days later, and Patrick ominously notes that it “as if one step away was the quicksand of the new world” - perhaps foreshadowing of his own fate.
By the end of the passage, the station has swiftly transformed from a “palace” to “the belly of a whale”. Patrick’s identity is a fragile thing by the end of this passage; as he calls his name into the “high air” it “struggled up in a hollow echo”. Far from all the colour, scents and tastes of his old existence “which he could summon up even now in the heart of
This type of sentiment is typical of a post-modern approach. The novel itself conforms to many aspects of post-modernist writing: it’s lack of uniformity, disrupted chronology and fragmented characters. Patrick’s feeling of isolation and the loneliness of existence are familiar ideas in post-modern thinking. The inability to fully relate to those around us is explored through many of the character relations in this book.
I have chosen to focus on the section in the Picador edition from page 156 to 164. I will give you a brief summary of what occurs in this section to refresh your memories. Ondaatje opens by recalling
The opening sentence of this section is key to what I want to concentrate on in my analysis, memory. ‘Cato would always arrive late,
It is worth noting that initially Patrick has to relate himself to the account,
‘Patrick stopped her hand moving,
- So they were Finns.
- What?
- Finns. When I was a kid . . .
Now in his thirties he finally had a name for that group of men he witnessed as a child.’ (157). Not only does he interrupt
The next section includes excerpts from Cato’s letters to
A question I put to the group is: by agreeing with Heble’s idea of character compensations are we inferring that Ondaatje is suggesting that these characters just have functions servicing one another or that the character relationships are actually unique?
My chosen passage follows the page break on pg 36 of the Picador edition with the line ‘Nicholas Temelcoff is famous on the bridge’ and ends with the next page break, ‘He knows his position in the air as if he is mercury slipping across a map.’
I have selected this passage because it is placed in the middle of the episode in which Temelcoff saves the nun on the bridge. This was my favourite episode in the book, and one which I felt was most memorable, but this passage in particular stands out because of the narrative shifts (Heble refers to this in the article in the course-pack pg 249, but in reference to another passage). Both passages before and after this extract are written in the past tense, but this shifts into the present, which has the effect of placing the reader closer to Temelcoff, giving the sense the we are there with him rather than simply being an observer from a distance. At the same time, however, there is a shift in perspective. The passages before and after are both written from Temelcoff’s perspective; although in the 3rd rather than 1st person, what is going on is seen through his eyes and we have his thoughts presented in a stream of consciousness. This excerpt, in contrast is written from the narrator’s point of view, which one would assume would distance the reader. I feel it does the opposite, possibly because of the how he is presented; the opening, ‘Nicholas Temelcoff is…’, takes the character from the novel and places him directly in front of the reader. It is followed by a list of facts, ‘He is given all the difficult jobs…He descends into the air…He is solitary’ (36), so we feel like we have more information about him, but none of it is personal. There is a strong contrast between the man presented from the interior through his own thoughts and the one presented from the exterior through the narrator, a contrast between private and personal history. What I suggest Ondaatje is trying to achieve are different views of the immigrant; to the nun, and us the readers who are privy to what has occurred, he is a strong, sensitive man, who seems to be struggling with the dislocation he feels, which is evident from connection he makes with her; to everyone on the outside, his employers, his colleagues, he is simply another worker, albeit one (like Patrick and his father) with an exceptionally risky job which ‘no one dreams of doing’ (37). In a sense, we feel closer to him because this passage presents him at a distance from everyone else. We know his interior.
Further to the fact that he is a ‘solitary’ (36) figure, who no one really knows, we are told that ‘even in archive photographs it is difficult to find him’ (36). This is the kind of thing that Heble highlights as evidence of ‘homogenizing practices in the production of Canadian history’ (241). If it is hard to see him in a photo, which is definite evidence of him being at the construction of the bridge, it would be even more difficult to hear his story when the only evidence is Temelcoff himself, unless he is able to pass it on to someone. At this point in the novel, he has no relationships, so no one to pass his story to, which is why, I suggest, he tries to make such a connection with the nun. We must remember that no one knows the nun has survived, there is no one except her to either pass on or corroborate the story (except, obviously, the narrator, who passes it onto the reader). Basically, Temelcoff as a person is overlooked, and as such, is omitted from the history of the making of the bridge.
I also thought that the final comment, ‘like mercury slipping across a map’ (38), links nicely in with what Heble says about ‘the “reality” constructed by maps’ (239), and the fact that Patrick’s hometown, ‘which did not appear on a map until 1910…the land had been homesteaded since 1816’ (11). In itself, it is an unusual image (do we consider Temelcoff to be volatile and able to separate into smaller parts of himself, or possibly a good alloy, attaching well to other elements?) , but is it suggesting that he does not really know where he is because the accuracy of the map depends upon who has envisioned it?
