Critical perspectives on Ondaatje's work

Reviewed by Chandana Dissanayake

In their Editorial to Vol.10. No.2 of Moving Worlds, Professors Shirley Chew and Chandani Lokuge state that ranging widely across his oeuvre and approaching his fiction, poetry and films from fresh and interesting angles, the essays in this issue leave us in no doubt of Michael Ondaatje's distinction and achievements as a writer of our time.

Coming as it does several months following the publication of this issue of Moving Worlds, this review should record that the statement is indeed true and the only inevitable exclusion within the journal's content happens to be a critique of Ondaatje's most recent semi-autobiographical/picaresque work The Cat's Table.

In her essay 'Framing Fame: Michael Ondaatje's Cinema of Affection and Liminality', Milena Marinkova observes that 'Ondaatje recognises...that the encounter between the worlds of art and reality is always partial and the line between the two simultaneously elusive and impossible to obliterate.' The comment is followed by the pertinent observation that while some of Ondaatje's works reiterate 'the impossibility of containing reality and art in separate frameworks', that his 'work is replete with images of photographs coming to life, paintings being penetrated, films spilling into reality.'

Referring to critical opinion on Ondaatje's poetry, Catherine Bates in 'Dancing Discard: Michael Ondaatje's Elimination Dance' alludes to the poet's 'preoccupation with violence and beauty, chaos and form, nature and art...' Offering the view that Elimination Dance 'is a descriptive poem' Bates emphasizes that it does not fit 'comfortably alongside Michael Ondaatje's early lyric poetry nor his later and more politically engaged fiction' and that 'it remains awkwardly on the sidelines.'

'The photographic portraits in Running in the Family...work with the written text to change the way in which we approach the past and images of the past' , states Jeffrey Orr in 'Photographic Empathy: Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family and W.G Sebald's The Emigrants.' 'In Running in the Family, Ondaatje addresses...duality in photographic meaning by carefully (re)positioning the reader, so that we move from approaching the images included in the text as evidential illustrations of the historical truth value of the narration to approaching them as family photographs with emotional, rather than evidential, value.'

Orr adds: 'One of the conceits of photographic realism is that we see in the photograph what the photographer sees through the camera. The picture plays with this conceit by holding out the possibility that, in viewing it, we are looking through the eyes of Ondaatje's father. Rhetorical address demands a topos, the identification of common ground, so this image draws the viewer into a position of common identity through familial affinity.'

Responding to issues of the poetics of cultural representation in the Canadian literary environment of the late twentieth century, Aparna Halpe observes that 'Ondaatje's early work consistently spawned a heated critical debate' over such representation.

In her study 'Fielding Ondaatje: A Brief Look at the 'Canadian' Response', she further comments that 'the anxiety over Ondaatje's narration of Sri Lanka invites a particularly complex negotiation of issues of agency and location that, in turn, provokes a varied and fruitful exploration of differing critical practices.'

The use of language in Running in the Family according to this critique 'is bound to the many times and places (the author) carries within himself as a diasporic writer partly educated in Sri Lanka, England and Canada.

It is shaped by the more contemporary inheritance of writing in Canada during a literary renaissance peopled by writers such as Nichol, Rudy Wiebe, Margaret Atwood and Robert Kroetsch.'

In 'The Return Journey and the Aesthetic of Rasa in Michael Ondaatje's poetry', Chandani Lokuge observes that 'driven by the desire for an alternative vision of life 'that makes them more at ease with (themselves)' writers such as Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul and Michael Ondaatje return physically or imaginatively to their homelands.

So far these return journeys have been researched for their positioning within key socio-political themes in postcolonial discourse.'

Seeing his work in a different light and exploring the application to Ondaatje's writing of the classical Indian theory of aesthetics, the theory of Rasa, Lokuge advances the view that Ondaatje works with ' a set of concepts that forms part of the aesthetic of traditional Sri Lankan culture...That Ondaatje deliberately applies the philosophical and aesthetic preoccupations of the theory of Rasa to some of his writings is an index to his interest in them and an invitation to us to reconsider his writing in this light.'

Referring to Ondaatje's re-reading of his homeland, Lokuge states: 'As a diasporic subject myself, my fascination with Ondaatje's later poetry and fiction lies not only in his return to the homeland for creative inspiration-story, plot and setting, for example-but in his creative revitalisation and rejuvenation of indigenous aesthetics.'

In his contribution (Anil's Ghost as Symphonic Poem: Viewed in the Context of Michael Ondaatje's re-engagements with Sri Lanka) to this volume, Ashley Halpe refers to yet another aspect of the issue of the author revisiting the homeland, this time with Anil's Ghost: 'Michael has not explained why he returned to the project of re-engaging with Sri Lanka.

Nor, I think, do we need to ask. Sufficient unto us that such a wonderful and gifted spirit yielded to that compulsion and began to search himself and to search for the reality of that terrible time when a miasma of fear and the reek of blood and burnt flesh clogged our noses and even more our tongues, when every moment of compassion or concern was fraught with a conscious courage and tremors of trepidation, mingled with guilt at not doing more..'

A superb read for the students of postcolonial writing, academics and critics, Michael Ondaatje: Critical Perspectives is published as content of Moving Worlds, an internationally refereed journal based at the University of Leeds.