I picked a passage from pg. 107 of the Picador:
‘Although he dynamites for the foreman, most of the time Patrick works with the muckers in the manual digging. He is paid extra for each of the charges laid. Nobody else wants the claustrophobic uncertainty, but for Patrick this part is the only ease in this terrible place where he feels banished from the world. He carries out the old skill he learned from his father – although then it had been in sunlight, in rivers, logs rumbling over themselves slowly in the air.’
I’d be lying if I said this was my first choice (thanks Mike), but as a second choice, I chose this passage for its applicability to Patrick’s role in the fiction, as well as providing a nice example of Ondaatje’s skilful prose.
The juxtaposed images of Patrick’s current situation, ‘banished’ to the mines, extradited from his nostalgia-soaked memories, are connected through this ‘claustrophobic uncertainty’. By copying his father’s past actions – carrying out ‘the old skill’ – by laying and detonating explosives, Patrick binds the past and present. Ondaatje also commands imagery of lightness and darkness as binders between the past/present divide. Light appears to be both a constructive and a destructive force. In this paragraph, it seems to demonstrate the creative illumination of memories - but these are memories of destruction. Darkness is also simultaneously determined to be both a banishing force and a haven for Patrick’s memories. The claustrophobic, poorly-lit confines of the tunnel emphasise the freedom and wide-open spaces of his romanticised childhood, constructed through Ondaatje’s poetic combination of light, water and air. But the explosives have the same destructive effect, no matter how poetic an environment, and both Patrick and his father employ this destruction for aiding construction, ultimately benefitting those with better socio-political footing. Perhaps that’s a little too Marxist.
This ‘claustrophobic uncertainty’ could be seen to echo historical uncertainty. Bearing in mind that the majority of workers involved in the mining project are immigrants, their facelessness, their absence of description, demonstrates the inherent linearity of postmodern works of literature. Communities still remain silenced, or their histories are recycled through others (e.g. Cato). Ondaatje recognises the complications of moving from a national to a social history, understanding that it is not a problem simply resolved by constructing voices for these societies: in reality, individuals resist such rigid stereotyping. However, I feel Ondaatje's ideas stretch beyond this point to discuss the complications of constructing individuality. Only the exceptional individual, as embodied in Patrick, that exists outside these communities has any real chance of constructing extra-cultural individualism. But there are jarring absences in his own genetic history that are silenced by Ondaatje – appearing more evident when contrasted to their vociferous treatment in Macleod's fiction – that emphasise the non-realist fabrication of Patrick.
Patrick exists as a construct to bridge the gap between the silenced past and present. He has very much existed alongside the strong cultural identity of the immigrant communities, as a spectator of their ways. As a child, he functions as an onlooker intrigued by the other – which he later discovers to be Finnish ice-skaters. As an adult, his socio-political positioning forces him out of woodland insularity and into the throbbing immigrant communities. The adoption of a lingua franca – part-gesture, part-limited vocabulary – leads to increased association and awareness of these communities and their distinctive cultural heritages. Through Patrick, Ondaatje could be seen as gesturing towards a potential Canadian identity, constructed in terms of the immigrant communities – but an identity that he understands to be inevitably unreachable.
Wednesday 14 November 2007
The other David's early-morning contribution
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3 comments:
My passage was quite similar as it suggests that Patrick not only serves as a construct to bridge the past and the present but also as a link between Canadians and the real immigrants. Patrick feels ‘ashamed’ that at the present time there is not a united community, but I do not think that Ondaatje wholly suggests that a connection to create a ‘Canadian identity’ is unreachable. I think that Ondaatje doesn’t just put forth the idea of a ‘potential canadian identity’ in individuals but also gestures towards a multifarious and multicultural Canada (in understanding with each other) as a whole. Although this may seem very idealistic of Ondaajte, I think he is attempting to show that he doesn’t think that this is completely impossible. For example, Ondaatje describes the leather dyers who are smoking together but each of them are a different colour from the dye. Nonetheless, after work they wash the colour from their skin and they all attend the public baths addressing each other such as ‘Hey Canada!’ I think this shows that even though many of the immigrant workers are from different backgrounds, Ondaatje is attempting to show that a Canadian identity and a unified community is not such a naïve hope for the future.
Others have been talking about the light and dark imagery in the novel in often vague terms, but what I like about this post is the way you draw out the double meanings of light and dark with some specificity. Both are potentially comforting, and both potentially destructive: it’s difficult to point to one or the other as the definitive way to understand the light & dark imagery. This semiotic slipperiness seems to me a feature of this text, in fact. So when I read the speculation at the end of your post that Ondaatje understands the kind of connected-up communities as an inevitably unreachable ideal for Canada, I think he may be leaving it more open than that.
Also, when you say ‘[the workers’] facelessness, their absence of description, demonstrates the inherent linearity of postmodern works of literature’ – other peoples’ posts in this discussion have focussed on the absence of linearity in this novel (eg. Asim’s & Theresa’s on fragmentation). Did you mean un-linearity? (if that’s even a word ..?! anyway, you know what I mean).
Re: My 'linearity' point. I didn't express it very precisely. I was suggesting that by presenting the facelessness of the workers - this collective force as the creators of the city - Ondaatje is creating a generalisation that isn't far removed from the silenced voices of colonial literature.
The weakness of using form - which, yes, is considered non-linear, fragmentary, in relation to other literary forms, but is linear insofar that it is restricted by language and the printed form (the latter of which is unproblematic for, say, hypertext) - is that silences still invariably will exist. The workers are still the 'others' to Patrick. To strive for utter inclusivity in historiographic metafiction would be ridiculous. Of course, Ondaatje is definitely not gesturing towards this all-inclusivity.
Anyway, I think I should stop before I become entrenched in some theoretical quagmire: I'm not really getting at anything. I guess that all Ondaatje is really trying to do is make history more, rather than entirely, representative.
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