The passage that I have chosen to analyse this week is on page 158 of the 1988 Picador version of ‘In the Skin of a Lion’ and begins with the line ‘She has delivered him out of nothing’. This passage was particularly interesting to me because it showed the vulnerable nature of Patrick’s personal identity, which he and various other characters have been struggling to find throughout the book. That line ‘She has delivered him out of nothing’ is especially significant because it has biblical overtones. The word ‘delivered’ creates the image of Alice as an almighty power, it likens her to God and thus sets Patrick as a ‘follower’ released of his former oppression. We learn from this line that what Patrick feels oppressed by is his feelings of nothingness- in a direct comparison to those who subscribe to a particular religion, Patrick’s faith and devotion to Alice has allowed him to discover more about himself. The notion that Alice had ‘torn his heart open’ with her political ‘art’ conveys an abundance of emotion, both through empathy and realisation. Patrick is moved by Alice because he is beginning to identify with her and this association is rescuing him from the dislocation and isolation of his own past.
In contrast to the ‘nothingness’ of Patrick, Alice is given a spectrum of characteristics. The passion of her personal strength, the strength that allows her to fight for her political beliefs is denoted through phrases such as ‘growls at his neck’ and ‘pulls him like a wheel’. In comparison to Patrick’s relative transparent identity, this deep knowledge of the self is set as something magical- the quote ‘laughing in midair’ portrays Alice as almost a mythical creature, as if her qualities of identity are exceptional. This is accentuated by Patrick’s use of the simile ‘like a human’ to describe Alice lying in his arms. This is ironic because it is clearly not a proper figurative expression; she is a real person. Her human traits make her even ‘more magical’ to Patrick because it is relatively novel to him that people can have such a strong personal identity created from their personal history, regardless of their present surroundings.
The use of the heron imagery is particularly revealing. Not only does the questioning of the heron/Alice’s creation reveal much about Patrick’s ordered and scientific way of thinking: ‘this structure of bones and feathers together, deciding on the weight of beak and skull…’it also shows his attention to the intricacies of detail. He absorbs Alice’s history in much the same way, using her personality to help recognise his own composition. Again there is a reminiscence of the biblical story of creation with this description, wondering at a creator who can make the heron/Alice ‘fly’. This likening to God highlights both Alice’s power and her limits- she will not always be appreciated by people like Patrick. In some senses in this passage Patrick almost predicts the downfall of his lover, the imagery of the heron ‘dead at his feet’ in reference to Alice prophesises his later experiences with her assassination.
This biblical imagery is important because it highlights the issue of belief, and also depicts the fictional quality of all history, even the grandest and most significant of narratives. A personal history may be used to define a society but society is always changing. I think Ondaatje is commenting on the notion that in trying to find national identities, the true nature of those nations personal identities is sacrificed. As soon as an identity is expressed that comes into conflict with the national ideal it is destroyed, and this is a serious issue that needs to be addressed.
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3 comments:
I like your choice of passage here. What I find interesting is your suggestion that Patrick's identity is 'transparent' - perhaps Patrick's identity is helped to be formed by the relationships he has (see Danni's post also; she suggests that Temelcoff has no relationships at one point and therefore cannot tell his story). Ondaatje certainly seems to be commenting upon the nature of identity formation for immigrants, but something that I find puzzling is why it is women that help influence them (in particular Patrick's move into politics). Maybe it is because women are also in the 'margins', therefore Ondaatje brings marginalised people in terms of national identity and people who are marginalised because of their gender together, and they support each other. This is just my interpretation though - what does everyone else think about this?
I think that you make an excellent point and this is something that I had not previously considered- I was focussing so much on the aspects of the relationship and Alice's personality that I sort of overlooked the issues of gender.
I think that you are right to assume that women are depicted so strongly because they are also in the margins-the entire novel is a myriad of the marginal and I suppose this open presentation of such groups and the demonstration of their successful interation (ie Alice and Patrick's love) is a celebration of variety- the individual is valued and is not oppressed under one homogenous national identity.
Alice is in some respects unconventional in her political strength- even today it is a relatively male dominated arena. This constant breaking and resistance to conventions is evident throughout the book- Caravaggion evades the constitutions of the law etc.
Great comment Louise! You're really got me thinking!
Your (Lucy’s) comments about the submerging of individual identities in national identity made me wonder whether perhaps Ondaatje was destabilising essentialist ideas about Canada (essentialism = that something or someone has a stable and unchangeable essence. eg. all women are fundamentally nurturing; LION has a definition here: http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/searchFulltext.do?id=R00787823&divLevel=0&queryId=../session/1195114979_8910&trailId=115A7E899F0&area=ref&forward=critref_ft) as he demonstrates how they are capable of erasing all other voices/narratives that don’t fit the national ideal (as you show in your analysis).
As to Louise’s theory about why women are influential in the novel – I think you (Louise) are right to pick up on it, as it’s no accident that these two central and pivotal figures are women. It’s possible that Ondaatje did it that way because histories/narratives of working-class life have (more in the past than right now) come in for criticism for being all about the male side of the equation, when public and paid labour (usually carried out by men, when it’s manual labour) is made possible by unpaid and private labour (usually carried out by women). And indeed most of the manual labour in this novel is represented as being undertaken by men. So I can imagine Ondaatje setting out to write a novel of the immigrant working-class building Toronto, and deciding to show how significant women are to that project (in both their private and public capacities).
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