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 Alice’s memories of Cato and then sets this in the context of a conversation between Alice and Patrick. The reader is then allowed to witness Patrick reading Cato’s letters to Alice and his engagement with them finishing with Patrick’s thoughts.
The opening sentence of this section is key to what I want to concentrate on in my analysis, memory. ‘Cato would always arrive late, Alice remembers, his bicycle clanging to the pavement outside her window.’(156) The tense choice here ‘remembers’ as opposed to remembered provides the effect that Alice is present in the moment, engaging the reader with the character and her memories. Ondaatje then introduces Patrick to the scene so that now Alice’s memories are being shared with him as well as the reader. This is a particularly interesting moment to the novel as a whole as through out the text the reader follows Patrick’s journey through his memoirs but now gets to observe how Patrick responds and engages with other’s recollections.
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 Alice but initially has to focus on his memories instead of paying full attention to her.
The next section includes excerpts from Cato’s letters to Alice from his final days describing Patrick reading them and then engaging with the content. Ondaatje then furthers the details of Cato’s story but cleverly through the imagination of Patrick. ‘Patrick sees Cato writing by the tallow light . . . sealing the letter, passing the package..’(161) this shows Patrick’s new interest with Alice’s previous lover, echoing the interest with Clara and Ambrose. The lines ‘Patrick has clung like moss to strangers, to the nooks and fissures of their situations’ and ‘Clara nd Ambrose and Alice and Temelcoff and Cato – this cluster made up a drama with out him(163) embody the narrative of the text as we follow Patrick’s continual interaction with a variety of characters. Heble in the essay ‘Putting Together Another Family: In the Skin of a Lion, Affiliation, and the Writing of Canadian (Hi)stories’ also addresses this idea, ‘The novel is awash with acts of compensation (Alice for Clara, Clara for Alice, Patrick for Cato)’ (249).
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?
1 comment:
A great question; let me try and give an answer, though it’s a complex question and worth more opinions than mine. I think it is possible that both these things can be simultaneously true: the characters function to serve one another (as we as human beings do in our everyday lives) but they are at the same time unique, both in themselves and in their relationships with one another. This gets back to what I was saying in my response to David A (about his analysis of the light & dark imagery): that often there’s a semiotic ambiguity about Ondaatje’s images which means that it’s hard to hierarchise one interpretation over another. I think this is a feature of good writers: they allow for a lot of complexity in readings of their novels, and a lot of potential meanings can be drawn out.
This idea of compensation could be extrapolated to the act of novel-writing as a whole, especially where historical subjects such as the settlement of Canada or the Holocaust are concerned. In these contexts, fictional figures ‘compensate’ for real ones, and there is a question of whether or not this is adequate to represent what for some has been a fraught and painful reality. Can fictional characters capture historical reality? What if authors get it wrong? We will, I hope, go into more detail about questions like this when we look at Fugitive Pieces.
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