Jason pwns Ondaatje

I will discuss a passage beginning halfway down page 105, in the Vintage edition:

“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 North America beside a hissing lamp, racing with the speed of their shadows. Each blow against the shale wall jars up from the palms of the shoulders as if the body is hit. Exhaustion overpowers Patrick and the other within twenty minutes, the arms itching, the chest dry. Then an hour more, another four hours till lunch, when they have thirty minutes to eat… (contd)”

This is the scene where Patrick is working on the tunnel under Lake Ontario. It details the daily grind of the diggers, as they excavate the tunnel. The representation of the workers reminds me of ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’ by George Orwell, where the immaculate restaurants of Paris were founded on the frantic, filthy toil of the ‘plongeurs’ (low ranking waiters) in the underground kitchens. Like Orwell, Ondaatje manages to dehumanise the workers without making them seem inherently unlikeable.

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 Toronto, but Ondaatje wants us to understand the project from the perspective of those who are building it. He emphasises the sheer volume of the lake’s water to drive home the fact that these men are risking their lives, terrified of an error of ‘one degree’; we learn that Patrick is overwhelmed by the feeling of ‘the whole continent before him’. The emotions of the labourers are fleshed out, which allows us to better perceive the price that was paid for such ‘schemes’ – a price that is overlooked when we marvel at the finished product of our architectural marvels, bought at the expense of many men’s nerves, and even lives.

When speaking of the muckers’ fear of being engulfed by the water from the Lake, Ondaatje cryptically phrases it as a torrent of water ‘shouldering them aside’. If the novel seeks to explore the lives of those who were pre-destined to insignificance, the image of these people being literally washed away into obscurity in the grander ‘scheme’ of things is very powerful. The muckers fear ‘fast’ deaths, the implication in the word ‘fast’ is that they will be forgotten as quickly as they perish.

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 Canada, and the place of Canada in a wider cultural frame. But Ondaatje himself has said, when interview by Hutcheon, that he is drawn to ‘unspoken and unwritten stories’. His focus is on lending volume to voices which have been too little heard.

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 Baltimore, Maryland, in books such as ‘The Corner’, which chronicled the brutal lives of heroin addicts. Simon said he aimed to be realistic in order to ‘not be embarrassed in front of (the people he represented)…. I wanted them to say, “You got it right”.

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.