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.
3 comments:
Hello Nikki! I would like to post a comment on your entry, as the passage you chose also caught my attention when reading the book. (As a matter of fact, I hesitated whether to choose this extract as a basis for my blog entry for this week.)
To be more precise, I think I had another interpretation for the feldspar story, i.e. :"There was a piece of feldspar in his pocket that his fingers had stumbled over during the train journey. He was an immigrant to the city." To me, the piece of feldspar that he keeps in his pocket suggests the fact that maybe Patrick wishes to keep a connection with his past life, that he does not want to break away completely from it. Like all immigrants going to a foreign country (or to the big city in this case), you want to integrate in the new culture and to become a part of it, to get lost in it, but at the same time keeping even the tiniest bit of your culture with you is also a "part of the deal" so to say. In my opinion, I think that Patrick keeps this piece of feldspar so close to his body, in his pocket, in order not to forget who he is and where he comes from.
I also believe that the feldspar in Patrick’s pocket is a metaphor for his past. Despite the fact that the tool representing his past is hidden in his pants, he can still feel (touch) it. That means that even though it is possible to “lock away“ one’s past, like Patrick does it when arriving in Toronto, it is not possible to ignore and to forget it as one’s past is and will always be part of every individual.
I agree that Ondaatje, through the character of Patrick Lewis, very realistically expresses the feelings one might experiences when being thrown into a new and unknown world. First, Patrick the young village boy is overwhelmed and deeply impressed by all the impressions coming from his new surrounding. Then, after the first rush of emotions has passed, he starts to see the new reality and the problems it causes: now Patrick will have to redefine himself according to the new situation and he will also experience the struggle for articulation.
The opposition between the city and the country that you bring out here relates back to what we’ve discussed in class about regionalism. Where No Great Mischief illustrated tensions between Nova Scotia and Ontario, it was also playing out the opposition between rural Cape Breton and urban Toronto. As we also saw in No Great Mischief, to talk about the city and the country is also usually to meditate on modernity and industrialisation, and it’s possible to see the man shouting and raving as a manifestation of the threat to subjectivity that modern industrial cities were felt to generate. Cities made it possible for individuals to be in very close physical proximity to each other – as Patrick and others are to this man – but to have no connection whatsoever (“everyone who at first received his scream personally” swiftly learns that he is not communicating with them).
To pick up on Cornelia’s and Tina’s comments about feldspar as a link to the past – feldspar of course appears at three significant points in the narrative: when Patrick arrives at Union Station, when he remembers his father’s death being buried by feldspar, and when he is facing Harris over Harris’s feldspar desk in the waterworks. It could be read as Cornelia does as evidence of Patrick’s desire to remember the past (and his father, but we don’t know that yet at this point in the narrative because we haven’t yet learned how his father died – more evidence of the importance of retrospection!). In the encounter with Harris, however, Patrick hasn’t brought the feldspar himself but rather finds it there and remarks on it. The feldspar could in this incident (which is, significantly, right at the end of the novel) be understood as the presence of the past in the present whether or not one realises it or wants it there.
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