I chose a passage from page 19 of the Picador edition:
“It was strange for Patrick to realize later that he had learned important things, the way children learn from watching how adults angle a hat or approach a strange dog. He knew how much a piece of dynamite the size of a bullfrog could destroy. But he absorbed everything from a distance”.
Canada’s history and Canadian historical writing are mainly concerned with the self-representation of the nation and the individual. Being a settler colony, Canada is inhabited by immigrants with different languages, cultures, knowledge and ideologies. The problem of self-definition and articulation is a prominent issue in Canadian history and literature. Due to their different social background settlers and their descendents are constantly challenged by the social reality and culture that surrounds them in their new homeland. Even though most immigrants have settled in Canada already a long time ago they still struggle to identify themselves with the dominant culture. Trying to adapt to other ideologies and beliefs is a long process which needs much effort and time. Finding a definition of oneself embraces of course not only the dominant history but also one’s own. Thus, it is not only about adaptation to and adoption of native social culture but as well about defining oneself in one’s own traditional terms. The problem of finding one’s individual identity is very well represented in the character of Patrick Lewis. That is why I chose the above quoted passage from In the Skin of a Lion. In this passage the reader is allowed a very explicit insight into the experience and construction of Patrick’s self.
Patrick can be said to have to cope with a double obstacle in trying to define his own identity: not only is he a child of a family from rural Canada but additionally he is a little boy growing up and starting to discover his own personal reality. On the one hand, being from a little village in the countryside, he has to face the conflicts between dominant (urban) history and his (rural) own. He has to experience what it means to be part of a minority; what it means to be ignored and despised by others even though this minority is part of Canadian reality and in fact cannot be erased.
On the other hand, in the passage selected, Patrick is still a little boy who is trying to find his own way in the world. A crucial part of constructing one’s personal identity is one’s family and the processes of growing up and learning within this personal surrounding. This process is hinted at in the passage. Patrick never consciously realised that he had learned something from his father. This is mainly due to the fact that his father never really spoke to anyone which alludes to the struggle of a minority to discover their voices. Nevertheless, some time later, he becomes aware of all the important things that his father had taught him in all the year. Metaphorically speaking, this shows that it is still possible to adapt to a new surrounding because, unconsciously or not, one culture does always adopt something from the other (dominant) culture. This is even possible when the two social realities are quite different from each other because also Patrick had picked up his father’s lessons event though “he absorbed everything from a distance”.
4 comments:
I think that you make an important point when you highlight the fact that Patrick only understands the significance and meaning of what his father has taught him when he looks back on it. I think that the novel is full of the imporance of retrospection, the notion that to move forward or perhaps even stop moving forward (in the case of conforming to the 'evil' homogenising nature of modern society) one must look back and decipher the past is very prevalent.
This sparks the whole debate about the place of history in identity, and of history as a concept itself. There is the sense that 'national identities' only 'borrow' personal histories when it is convenient- there is no stable point of understanding or unified narrative. Whether the absence of this stability is harmful is a contentious issue in the novel, there is the notion of balance between embracing a myriad of personal identities and feeling dislocated and lost in a country that struggles for its own identity.
Your post picks up the issue of the family, and it’s helpful to illustrate how the processes of becoming acculturated to different groups (different levels of society; a new country) begins right back at the level of the family. It struck me after reading your post that in this novel Ondaatje doesn’t present us with ‘typical’ nuclear families – he gives us single-parent families and orphans and people coming together into familial units in not particularly typical ways. So perhaps he’s illustrating the quilting-together of Canada by immigrants by using images of various family configurations that are less expected than others. (More on quilting when we do Alias Grace …)
Also, I’d be somewhat cautious about bold statements like ‘Canada’s history and Canadian historical writing are mainly concerned with the self-representation of the nation and the individual’. I haven’t read enough Canlit or Canadian history myself to make an attempt to say what it is mainly concerned with, and in any case often such broad statements run the risk of being too general rather than accurate. Better to frame your comments along the lines of ‘the representation of the nation and the individual is a concern that can be seen to animate the works on this course / some Canadian texts from the past ten years’ or similar.
Lucy, these are great points about retrospection and the need to decipher the past in order to decide best where to go (and this point is I think also very applicable to No Great Mischief). I think you're right about the idea of a balance needing to be struck between embracing multiple identities (as the actors do on stage, for example) and losing one's sense of selfhood (as Patrick does in the first part of the novel).
I think that, whilst you make an excellent point about ones individual identity, it is important to view this book as many fragmented individual identities contributing to an overall 'national identity'. In the novel, specific attention is drawn not only towards the individuals but (as seen in the case of the bridge construction workers) groups of individuals coming together to form a single, however disjointed, indentity. This is re-enforced by the books title. It is not 'In the Skin of Lions', but a singular 'Lion'. This is perhaps once again a strong suggestion by Ondaatje, that his book deals with individual histores, but only as part of one collective identity.
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