| Michael Ondaatje(1943—)is one of the most influential Canadian contemporary authors.Since the 1970s,he has published all together seven fictional works.Among these works,The English Patient makes him the first Canadian to win the Booker Prize,and another two novels,Anil’s Ghost and Divisadero,win him such major literary awards as the Governor General’s Awards and the Giller Prize,establishing himself as a prominent literary figure.Meanwhile,Ondaatje is also a controversial writer.Whether the self-consciousness of art for art’s sake in his fictional writings severs their connections with history and reality,or promotes the establishment of new connections,has caused heated arguments.As a key figure in the literary practice of Canadian postmodernism,Ondaatje’s postmodern writer identity seems to have foreseen his involvement into the similar debate over whether or not postmodernism is a new depthlessness or a diminishment of historicity.What further reduces him to a target for widespread criticism is his obsession with art.His characters,regardless of their social status and nationalities,are always more or less artists.Like many ethnic minority writers living in the West,Ondaatje tends to tell stories about the Third World,or of western ethnic minority groups.Such stories seem incompatible with an artistic world.Nevertheless,it is unfair to deny simply on that ground Ondaatje’s examination of reality,or to distort his political tendencies.Similarly,it is also debatable whether the pursuit of postmodern aesthetics renders one’s writings ahistorical,apolitical,or depthless.Based on the existing controversies surrounding Ondaatje,this dissertation is a study of violence,a defining characteristic of his writings,in Ondaatje’s fiction.Borrowing from Zizek’s and Benjamin’s theories of violence,as well as Foucault’s order-discourse theory,this study tries to demonstrate the representation of multiple themes of violence in Ondaatje’s fictional works.Meanwhile,it analyzes how in the writing of violence,Ondaatje’s work starts a dialogue with reconciliation in the context of "Truth and Reconciliation Commission",proposing instead other possibilities of reconciliation.By examining how Ondaatje’s fiction discloses the violent nature of language,the divine dimension of divine violence,and the systemic violence of capitalist power system,this study illustrates the writer’s concern over and criticism of some burning social issues,thus restoring his writings’ historical and political depth.This dissertation is composed of three chapters.Chapter One deals with language violence which refers not just to the violence of language in its ontological sense in In the Skin of a Lion,but to that which has been unconsciously endured and imposed upon others by those trapped in language prison in The English Patient.Based on Zizek’s theory of symbolic violence,Heidegger’s interpretation of language as the house of being,together with the theoretical discourse of psychoanalysis,this chapter explores the fundamental violence of language and the violence it generates in the course of symbolization.Language violence also renders visible the cultural trauma endured by minority groups which further complicates the issue of forgiveness,i.e.,whether or not forgiveness is effective when it encounters trauma.The imposition of imagined identities upon the patient in The English Patient reflects how the subject is"tortured" in the house of language.This process is comparable to colonizers’imagination and naming of colonies.Therefore,when finding out his victim position as the colonized,Kip also realizes he has both become the perpetrator of violence and been complicity in the perpetration.The transgression of victim’s and victimizer’s identity deprives Kip of the right to forgive,reducing him to those who need to be forgiven.Accordingly,the two novels investigate such issues as the effectiveness of forgiveness,the power to forgive,and the paradox intrinsic to the tradition of forgiveness via Patrick’s futile forgiveness and Kip’s personal tragedy of incapable forgiveness.Furthermore,regarding collective reconciliation as nothing but political myth,both works advocate the establishment of harmonious interpersonal relationship so as to realize interpersonal reconciliation.Chapter Two explores how justice falls into crisis with an examination of divine violence in Anil’s Ghost and Divisadero.On the one hand,Anil’s Ghost conveys that the discourse of justice does not necessarily apply to any situation.Holding faith in global justice,Anil attempts to bring to trial divine violence which though mixed with other forms of violence within the Sri Lankan Civil War,cannot be included in the order of justice.Her persistence results in the dislocation of justice and more unjust violence,Anil’s Ghost thus denouncing the hegemonic nature of universal justice discourse.On the other hand,the counterpoint in Divisadero among domestic violence in a farm in California,divine violence in a casino in Las Vegas,and war violence in the Gulf,shows the interpenetration of justice and injustice.The divine violence committed by Coop is not violent,yet it reveals some injustice.There is a contradiction between such injustice and the justice conveyed by tangible violence in the farm and Iraq,which in turn shows the unjust core of seeming justice.By blurring the boundaries between justice and injustice,the novel aims to underline what means just to some can be unjust to others.There is no such thing as absolute justice;only relative justice is of absolute certainty.Moreover,both works imagine how artistic salvation brings forth deferred and delayed reconciliation which differs from immediate reconciliation proposed by "truth commissions".Chapter Three delves into how the underlying order of discourse and the violence of capitalist power system come into being in Ondaatje’s trilogy of biographical fiction.The official record of historical truth in Coming Through Slaughter is but a narrative of history.The work’s innovation in narrative strategies renders its narration uncertain,truth a narrative and constructive,uncovering that the authoritative historical truth recorded by official history results always from the compulsory order of discourse within a system.What relatives narrate about Ondaatje’s father’s life in Running in the Family is not truth but a fallacy.Three literary genres of the work,i.e.,travel journal,memoir,and historiographic metafiction,divide it into three layers of text,with the latter constantly deconstructing the former.Focusing on travelling experiences,the first layer of the text seems to have ignored history and evaded reality.However,when it comes to the second layer,one can find the text allude to Sri Lanka’ s history of colonization and its social realities in the period of independence.The process of history writing exhibited in the third layer reduces the history shown in the second layer to unreliable family memoir.The life Ondaatje meticulously fabricates for Mervyn deconstructs the oppression imposed upon him by power system,delivering a truth more reliable.What readers take as true of the author’ s childhood experience in The Cat’s Table composes only one-eighth of truth iceberg above water.The novel’s autobiographical writing creates a contrast between readers’ expectation of the book as recollection of childhood and its actual record of the disappearance of childhood,unveiling the truth of childhood as how the author ends up,since his entrance into capitalist power system,living a life of diaspora.The adaptation of truth in these works,i.e.,Bolden’s life histories,Mervyn’ s otherwise life stories,and the fabricated adventure at the Oronsay,shows how the author generates from the power of literary creation the violence of literary representation,counteracting systemic violence and deconstructing the compulsory order of discourse within the system.In the end,one can discern in the trilogy ultimate reconciliation with a traumatized self via a rediscovery of self.The self-consciousness of art for art’s sake in Ondaatje’s fictional works by no means dissevers themselves from reality.It is via his peculiar preference for violence that Ondaatje’s fiction addresses and critiques reality,examines and questions history.Hence,Ondaatje’s writing of violence is never the embodiment of his aestheticism similar to the idea of art for art’s sake,violence for violence’s sake.Instead,it shows how the author cautiously intervenes in reality through literary means as symbolism and metaphor.In brief,this study defends Ondaatje’s writings on the basis of a survey of the controversies over them,while evaluating their artistic value,critical vitality,and historical depth.With Ondaatje having established himself as a canonized writer today,it is unnecessary to reiterate his literary achievements.Rather,the long-forgotten moment when he became highly controversial and culpable is preferred.It is from this moment that a dynamic,progressive,and changing view of Ondaatje’s entire literary career can be formed,hence a discovery of the always unperceived aspect of the Canadian writer. |
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