Writing Spaces, Writing Differences: Michael Ondaatje's Novels

[[abstract]]Space is a recurring motif throughout Michael Ondaatje’s novels, yet it gains little attention in critics’ interpretation. My dissertation will develop a “spatial” perspective to approach Michael Ondaatje’s fiction: Coming through Slaughter, In the Skin of a Lion, The English Patient, and Anil’s Ghost. In reading Ondaatje, the principle thesis is: spaces are manifested as difference and multiplicity, and emerge as trajectories of co-existing Others, rather than as given structures or static backdrops against which events unfold. In Chapter One, “Towards a Spatialization of Ondaatje’s Fiction,” I justify the “spatialization” of Ondaatje’s novels, because critics have tended to interpret them from the perspective of metafictional historicism. Historicism as such is often positively viewed as a subversive re-working of the excluded life-stories of the Other. However, I argue that spatiality should also be understood as dynamic and differentiated as history, since Others’ life-stories inevitably involve “geography” that can never be subsumed under historical narratives. To reassert space as an embodiment of difference and heterogeneity, I draw upon the spatial theories from Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, all of whom are concerned about spaces of resistance. In Chapter Two, “Space beyond Representation: Coming through Slaughter,” I will argue from the Lefebvrian perspective that the space of Other resists being reduced to representation. I begin with the argument: even a postmodern subject needs to occupy a position so as to make his/her enunciation, and such positioning requires that he/she appropriate certain spaces as sites for speech acts. Given that subjectivity is space-oriented, I further deal with the question whether the space in which the otherized protagonist, Buddy Bolden, positions himself is “representable” or not. I address this problem by using Lefebvre’s notion of conceived space and lived space, as well as rhythmanalysis. In Chapter Three, “In the Skin of a Lion: A Heterotopic Writing of Space,” I analyze how Ondaatje re-writes the immigrants’ spatial experiences and their resistant strategy of re-appropriating the urban space of Toronto. In the Skin of a Lion conveys a paradoxical idea that power relations penetrate every space but are inevitably counterattacked by those repressed subjects who develop their strategies of spatial resistance. To illustrate this idea, I find Foucault’s notion of “heterotopia” useful for us to understand the coexistence of dominance and resistance, of order and disorder in a certain space. In Chapter Four, “Beyond the Centre-Margin Divide: The Deleuzian Cartography in The English Patient,” I will firstly critique the centre-versus-margin paradigm in which the margin is usually romanticized as the site of resistance, while the centre stands for the locus of hegemony and oppression—a spatial thinking that is grounded on a dualist logic. To re-imagine space as a more complex process of interweaving, I will use Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of “smooth space” and “striated space” to rethink spaces in more dynamic relativity: spaces are fields where forces converge, forces that are contested, contradicted, conjugated, assemblaged, territorialized, deterritorialized and so on. In Chapter Five, “Escaping Home: Experiencing Spaces through Mobility in Anil’s Ghost,” I will argue that Ondaatje does not prioritize the margin (i.e. Sri Lanka) so as to write back to the Empire, because the novel breaks with the anti-colonial assumption that the margin, or the colonized homeland, is the site of promise where the colonial subject’s national identity can be empowered. I will address how the concept of home has been constructed by the politics of location, and how it is deconstructed in the context of transnational mobility.