Wednesday 14 November 2007
Theresa's post
The extract that I have chosen in on page 56 and begins at the line ‘Now in the city’, continuing until the end of the page. In my opinion this passage seeks to convey a complex disparity between the physical and verbal. A stark vision of Patrick’s entrapped image reflected in a telephone booth is presented. To me this appears to represent the idea that Patrick’s voice has been silenced and instead he is confined to recognition of his self purely through the physical. From the outset a loss of identity becomes poignant ‘he was new, even to himself’ with this concept being firmly rooted in the marginalisation of his voice ‘He spoke out his name and it struggled up in a hollow echo and was lost in the high air’. The choice of high further emphasies the hugeness of this foreign environment of ‘the new world’ and reiterates the segregation of high and low illustrated through the elegantly dressed man, with this contrast being a dominant Postmodern concern. The pinnacle of personal recognition, his name, is lost. While the lexical choice of ‘struggled’, reiterated the struggling of the ex-centric individuals, for example the immigrants, who frequent the novel. However Patrick’s physical image itself also appears relatively unstable as it is reflected and refracted through the booths; he can not even fully know his own physical identity. The opposition between the physical and verbal is further instilled through Patrick’s encounter of the man, elegantly dressed, but cursing in another language. The lack of description of this man, with the focus being upon his clothing in both instances points to the physical as a manifestation of class and eminence yet this is firmly contrasted with his ‘scream’. However once more the physical is destabilised as the man wears a different suit and is unable to move from the ‘safezone’, the fear of change monopolises him. Oppositionally Patrick seems to embrace travel as the train becomes an intimate city, indeed the lexical choices of Ondaatje present the station in a state of nature ‘caverns’, ‘tides’, ‘echo’. This state of nature realigns Patrick with his past and the theme of water, as with Green, Grass, Running Water and No Great Mischief, which underlies the text ‘tides of movement’, with these tides emphasising the instability. Personal history is reiterated in this short extract ‘the past is locked away’, as the importance of memory and the individual becomes explicit, the reference to Patrick’s suitcase being locked away presents history as a relic which is hidden but which you may return to and access later ‘What remained in Patrick from his childhood were letters frozen inside mailboxes after icestorms’ (pg 55). While Patrick identifies the instability of his identity he almost appears to rejoice in this as he awes at the bigness which consumes him ‘the belly of a whale’, ‘the city’, ‘the new world’. Finally this repeated juxtaposition between the body and the voice is solidified through the narrative as the verbal storytelling nature, characterised by the fragmented un-linear narration is printed and thus the verbal becomes the physical.
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3 comments:
i think your choice of the passage concerning Patrick’s reflection in a telephne booth was very compelling and serves as another metaphor of how, in an alien environment, a person’s identity becomes more complex, multifaceted. For instance, the division and creation of a new Patrick that he is unfamiliar with. (“new, even to himself’)
A comment in Nancy Huston (an English-canadian and french writer)’s Nord Perdu s also illustrates that point: ”That’s what exile is. Mutilation.Censorship.Guilt.” *
The reflected image you get in a window, contrary to the one you get by looking into a mirror, is weakened, lessened and therefore doesn’t manage to render as well an impression of realness. (I may be pushing a bit too far..) but it could also be seen as a ghostly refection, a metaphor of his former physical self now belonging to the past and leaving behind it an incomplete version of himself. Or, refering to NH’s quote, a mutilated version of himself.
*The case of this writer is also very interesting in that she chooses to translate all her books herself .(she writes both in English and in French depending on what she writes about and how she feels about what she writes)
I think she favors that option because it is very hard to stay true to oneself in a foreign language, to properly render what you are or the idea you have of yourself.
Her choice also translates a refusal of that divison of self and an acceptance of a new person that you canbe brought to no longer consider as broken but can come to accept as enriched, enhanced.
The opposition between the physical and the verbal that you bring out is I think a productive one: often literary representations of characters focus on their inner lives – thoughts, feelings, inner histories etc – but Ondaatje is at pains to point out the bodilyness of his characters. That moment where Nicholas catches the nun who has fallen off the bridge and jolts his arm out of its socket produces an almost visceral reaction in the reader (well, it did for me) and elsewhere in the novel there is insistent foregrounding of images of the body. (James’s reading of Patrick and Alice making love provides another example.)
I think what you have here can be mapped onto the dichotomy Mike set up about language as freedom vs. language as exclusion: when language operates as exclusion, Ondaatje’s characters must have recourse to their bodies. The immigrants do the dangerous and exhausting physical labour they do partially because their lack of familiarity with the dominant language excludes them from easier and physically less demanding jobs.
Using the term 'loss of identity' is one that I think can be very strongly debated either way in this passage. I personally would say Patrick's oservations are seen with fresh eyes, he is assessing the scene in a new phase of his life. If he has lost his idenity, he has certainly found a new one, marking a new stage in the characters journey. I think his loss of voice is actually highlighting the vastness of Toronto and the size of Patrick within this city- rather that belittling him. Ondaatje is capturing a clear moment of assesment and confusion- but i would argue the character is not at a loss.
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