James thinks...

A passage I found especially interesting to read starts on page 151 from the second paragraph in the vintage addition. Are you sitting quietly? I shall begin.

To remind you all, this passage describes Patrick talking with Alice and then making love to Alice. But before they do so as Alice is telling Patrick about her family’s past as Finnish immigrants living in Canada Patrick realizes that their lives have actually been entangled before, or at least her Family’s path crossed his.

Patrick just before the close of the first book observes a group of ice skaters cutting through the night with lamps blazing and is fascinated by the existence of such strangers just brushing against his life and then disappearing into the bleak cold night. Alice tells Patrick about the conditions of Cato’s birth and how his father had to skate through the ice to get a doctor to help.

This brief exchange of memories for me embodies the subtle complexity of Ondaatje’s prose. It is of course an emotive shading to Patrick and Alice’s relationship, a kink, a coincidence of fates, designed enough to be intentional, but so vague and fleeting as so to be meaningless, making it seems all the more destined. However primarily I assume this realization of past meetings with the Finnish, this physical intertexuality of lives in divergent cultures, is crafted in this chapter as so to further impress upon the readers Ondaatje’s understanding of history. That no body’s story is isolated completely from another, all are interconnected and all are equally important. This beautiful meeting of separate strands argues that there is significance in the individual’s transient and brief experiences, no matter what they be. We have Patrick as a boy, the symbol of the observer, the outsider, watching a society , growing into a man and then falling in love, joining with the immigrant culture, understanding it and then using this revelation of identity to shine a light back into his memory and comprehend the past. One thinks of the Brechtian theory of history, “No great men”, people only do things in relation to circumstance and others. Ondaatje carefully and humanely conjures the echoes of the lost voices of history, the must lauded, unknowns and retells their story as if they won, as if the workers were the heroes of history.

The engine that Ondaatje uses to bind his tapestry of interconnected paths is the poetry always flowing and present in his prose. The feel and ebb of the lines and the tendency of single lines to break from paragraphs as so to formally establish their superiority, their importance in decoding the symbolism of certain interactions, is to me very reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Though avoiding the same motifs Ondaatje manages to construct a narrative that is able to say and not say a thousands things in a single line. Which of course is the power, the strength of poetry, to not literally say something, to suggest another thing. And Ondaatje by using metaphor as a non realist mode of description so prolifically in his work, is able to open every mannerism and sight, every recollection to the readers interpretation. Making a public work, private to your whims. Though most people would consider a poetic prose to be rich and flowery, Ondaatje’s is tight, sparse and muscular. I liken it to being led through a tunnel by him, Ondaatje flashes his torch of language on whatever objects he feels you need to know about, leaving murky gaps and shades for you to fill in yourself. Gaps and shades in the light that Patrick is so enthused and fascinated by. In this scene in particular, just as Alice and Patrick make love Obdaatje focuses on the anatomy of the lovers, he notices lovely particularities, “the secret lift of her skin at each heartbeat“. As much as he can he draws us into the first person, this is what you would notice head against chest in bed. Before we read of Patrick and Alice lying down together we are told of the huge frozen land around them, but as they sit down to talk we hear nothing of the outside world, only themselves and the bed and the sensation of skin on skin. Indeed throughout his book Ondaatje uses the motif of nature, though not to establish the same effect, of the cold, of the trees, of the rivers and mountains, creating a language of description immersed in the geography of Canada. Nothing is free of the land.