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In the Skin of a Lion

by Michael Ondaatje

This unit was prepared by David Eldridge, Hornsby Girls High School

There are no facts, only interpretations.
(Frederick Nietzsche)

Syllabus

This module asks us to:

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Approaches to reading the text

The traditional approach to literary criticism saw literature as the product of the author's mind and the narrative voice as the author's voice in the novel. In other words, the author is the “author-ity” and when we read we should always be guided by the authoritative voice of the author, because meaning is a reflection of the author's thoughts, feelings and experiences. This traditional approach to criticism is also based upon Liberal Humanism which tends to focus on character and the universality of “the human condition”.

The modern approach to criticism is based upon post-structuralism which sees the interpretation of texts as endless. Because meaning is shifting and unstable there is no one “true” or authoritative reading. The authority is no longer vested primarily in the voice of the author but in the text itself and in the interaction between the text and the reader. There are as many versions of reality as there are readers. Modern critics therefore regard reading as a unique experience of the reader. The way we read a text, the meaning we derive from it and the value or values we ascribe to it are influenced by established ways of thinking about some aspects of the world. Modern criticism has also been heavily influenced by New Historicism or Cultural Materialism which emphasises the influence of context and the application of theory to the process of reading.

Our cultural context is therefore pre-eminent in the construction of a reading. Thus we can say that just as we interpret experience, we interpret texts when we read. Literary theory attempts to analyse and classify these different ways of reading and interpreting texts.

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Various readings

Module B directs you to explore a range of possible readings, or ways of approaching the analysis of texts. Literary theory, through equipping us with sets of questions to ask, helps us to understand various readings, such as:

It is not always necessary to define one of these readings and then set about showing how this reading can be applied to the text. It is better to have a demonstrable knowledge of these readings and be able to discuss the question with reference to these variant readings.

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Ideas

When exploring a specific reading we can apply it to one or more of the dominant themes or ideas in a novel. In the Skin of a Lion explores several ideas. The following are the most prominent:

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The author as reader

At the outset, before the narrative begins, the reader is told, through one of the epigraphs, that there is no authoritative reality. There are only versions of reality: “never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one”. We are warned not to expect an authoritative interpretation or re-creation of events, but rather we should be prepared to “read” the events ourselves just as the author himself has done. The textual implications of this are that the importance of the individual and individual experience is highlighted.

An important point to bear in mind is that we live in what is called “the postmodern age” and you probably have come across references to In the Skin of a Lion being a postmodern novel. You may have read that a characteristic of postmodern writing is the challenge to dominant narratives through a manipulation of narrative voice. Ondaatje does this as part of his overall purpose to give a voice to the typically unheard voices in history; however this manipulation also becomes structurally significant in that it allows Ondaatje himself to enter the novel and remind us that it is the omniscient author who is indeed the puppeteer with ultimate control over the patterns and paths which the characters follow. So as well as the structural function, this narrative technique of Ondaatje's becomes a thematic function in knitting together the characters in the way that he does.

Thus Ondaatje has created, out of narrative technique, a thematic device which works together with the structure of the text giving the novel a sense of order: the intersecting and missing of each other, we are reminded, are all “fragments of a human order”
(p. 145) held together by “the extreme looseness of the structure of things” (p. 163).

The omniscient author has “realign[ed] chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become.” (p. 146).

So, although Ondaatje draws our attention to the fact that there are as many versions of reality as there are readers, he is continually in the background, just off-stage, so to speak, manipulating events. At times his intervention can be quite overt, especially when he tells us what to think of certain characters, e.g., “She was totally unlike Patrick, always practical”, or when he tells the reader that, “All his life Patrick Lewis has lived beside novels and their clear stories. Authors accompanying their heroes clarified motives”.(p. 82) You might like to find a few more examples of Ondaatje “reading” the text for the reader.

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The postmodern context of the novel

Several critics refer to Ondaatje as a Canadian postmodern writer. If you are going to present a postmodern reading of In the Skin of a Lion then you must remember postmodernism is not an overarching philosophy or systematic theory, but rather an attempt to explain and define current, post (or “after”) modern culture, not just in the area of literature, but in the arts in general, including fashion, architecture, cinema, music and so on. For the purposes of this paper the following characteristics of postmodernism can be applied to In the Skin of a Lion:

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The postcolonial context of the novel

Postcolonial criticism, like postmodern criticism, rejects the universal and large scale in preference for the local and specific. In In the Skin of a Lion Ondaatje challenges the dominant narratives and gives a voice to the untold stories of the colonised. Ashcroft et al in Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies define postcolonialism as dealing with “the effects of colonisation on cultures and societies” (p. 186) and post colonial reading as “a way of reading and rereading texts... to draw deliberate attention to the profound and inescapable effects of colonisation on literary production; anthropological accounts; historical records; administrative and scientific writing” (p. 192). A postcolonial reading also rejects the universalism inherent in the liberal humanist readings of traditional criticism in favour of an acceptance of issues of cultural difference in literary texts. Culture itself is seen as a web of conflicting discourses. Thus it champions a celebration of hybridity and encourages a writing back from the margin or periphery to the centre. Canada has a history of resistance to colonialism. If you are applying a postcolonial reading then you should examine the novel for what it says about the dominant political and economic structures and how these serve the interests of the dominant class. Of course this leads us into a Marxist reading of the novel which would focus on the conflict of class interest and the oppression of the working classes. Marxist critics would say that all texts must be read in relation to the society in which they were composed and because writing is a political act criticism should be political as well. I will not be discussing a Marxist reading of the novel (nor will I be discussing a psychoanalytical or feminist reading) but you will be able to construct one from the information in this paper.

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A narratological approach

Immediately after the two epigraphs, Ondaatje clarifies, in a kind of preface or an epigraph of his own, the way the novel is structured, and by implication, the method of narration which is an essential part of his narrative technique:

This is a story a young girl gathers in a car during the early hours of the morning. She listens and asks questions as the vehicle travels through darkness. Outside, the countryside is unbetrayed. The man who is driving could say, “In that field is a castle”, and it would be possible for her to believe him.

She listens to the man as he picks up and brings together various corners of the story, attempting to carry it all in his arms. And he is tired, sometimes as elliptical as his concentration on the road, at times overexcited; “Do you see?” He turns to her in the faint light of the speedometer.

Driving the four hours to Marmora under six stars and a moon.

She stays awake to keep him company.

This provides an explicit context for the narrative and illuminates how Ondaatje will be presenting his narrative. There are references here to the narrative voice and its manipulation by Ondaatje, and to the narrative itself as a kind of patchwork being stitched and held together by the narrator. The inference is that this will be a story about story-telling. And it is memory that informs and characterises oral story-telling, thus accounting for the disjointed and fragmented and meandering nature of the story that Patrick tells Hana. Later, Ondaatje will tell us in one of his many reflexive allusions to his own craft as a novelist that, “The first sentence of every novel should be: ‘Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.' Meander if you want to get to town” (p. 146).

The elliptical structure of the novel, and the author's technique of using a character in the story as narrator, as well as employing a third person perspective, serve Ondaatje's purpose of creating a distancing effect in order to add veracity to his version of history. This is further enhanced by beginning the story at the end. Ondaatje is once again telling us that the story is a construction or reconstruction; a further reflexive pointer to the author/artist's role in creating order from chaos.

The postmodern concern to show that experience is not spontaneous but the product of conventions governing perception finds expression in self reflexivity, i.e. the drawing of attention to the novel's aesthetic and other stylistic devices.

Reference is also made to language—to the power that language has to create and manipulate reality. Students should bear in mind that language itself is a discourse of power:

... it provides the terms and the structures by which individuals have a world, a method by which the ‘real' is determined... language itself implies certain assumptions about the world, a certain history, a certain way of seeing.
(The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, eds. B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths and H. Tiffin, p. 55.)

To my mind, then, the three notions that lie at the heart of the meaning of this novel are: “authority”, “power” and “language”. Whatever reading you apply to In the Skin of a Lion you must examine these concepts.

A close and detailed study of the chapter that begins with Patrick, the searcher, researching Hana's photograph in the Riverdale Library (pages 143–149) will reveal how Ondaatje has structured his novel around these three concepts.

In an interview with Barbara Turner, Ondaatje tells us that In the Skin of a Lion initially began as an investigation of the life of Ambrose Small, the man whom the press called “the jackal of Toronto's business world”, a millionaire whose disappearance in 1919 occasioned the most vigorous man-hunt in Canadian history. But after he had written about 200 pages on Small, Ondaatje recalls, “I became much more interested in the minor characters ... I suddenly thought of a vista of Upper America where you had five or six people interweaving and treading kind of parallel lines, but somehow connected at certain times.”

He goes on to locate his book in an explicit ideological context: “I did an enormous amount of reading—about the Bloor Street Viaduct for example. I even had some friends help me with research on the book ... and I can tell you exactly how many buckets of sand were used, because this is Toronto history, but the people who actually built the goddamn bridge were unspoken of. They're unhistorical!”

This is echoed on page 145, when the reader is told that, “The articles and illustrations he found in the Riverdale Library depicted every detail about the soil, the wood, the weight of concrete, everything but information on those who actually built the bridge.” Ondaatje is reminding us that written histories, like all representations, are ideological constructs.

Thus, through employment of the narratological device of metafiction, Ondaatje uses Patrick as a reflexive voice to lead us through a series of discoveries and revelations which become the key to unlocking the meaning, purpose and structure of the novel.

In a sense then the book can be seen as a hymn to the immigrant experience (as the old 1999 HSC question suggested) in that it celebrates the immigrants who built the city of Toronto and restores them to the foreground of history by giving them a voice. At the same time Ondaatje reminds us that history is, like art, a construct: “only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events”. (p. 146)

Ondaatje challenges the “facts” of the dominant version of history. He finds them insufficient to tell the complete story of the people who laboured and suffered to create of the modern city of Toronto. And he does not pretend to tell the complete story either, but by focusing on the experiences of a few of these people, he does indeed widen the scope of our reading of Canadian history, and more inclusively, human history. The reader is urged not to accept the dominant or preferred reading of history, i.e. the beliefs and values perceived as more powerful in a culture but to explore alternative or resistant readings which challenge the dominant way of reading. Resistant and alternative readings are generally those favoured by marginalised or colonised people—those with less power—such as migrants and other minority groups.

It is through the power of language that Ondaatje, the artist, achieves this. As a writer, language is his medium, and it is the empowering force that gives his characters a vitality that enables them to give voice to the author's thematic concerns. It is the power of language that enables Alice to become an activist for workers' and migrants' rights, it is the power of language that enables Temelcoff to see how he has been sewn into history and begin to tell his story, and it is the power of language that eventually enables Patrick to tell his story. Patrick discovers the false power of dynamite; it is deceptive and self-negating when used as a tool for personal revenge. Patrick ultimately rejects its destructive power in favour of the liberating and community affirming power of language.

Patrick does make two violent false starts (acting out of revenge for Alice's death), before finally discovering his true role as a storyteller. He accepts the responsibility of donning the skin of a lion and talking his way into a version of history. Ondaatje has prepared us for this transformation of Patrick through Alice's description of the oral performance (which also reminds us of the Gilgamesh epic in the epigraph):

After half an hour the powerful matriarch removed her large coat from which animal pelts dangled and she passed it, along with her strength, to one of the minor characters. In this way even a silent daughter could put on the cloak and be able to break through her chrysalis into language. Each person had their moment when they assumed the skins of wild animals, when they took responsibility for the story. (p.157)

It is language, Ondaatje is saying, that enables the marginalised to step onto the stage of history and be heard. Those in power know this and that is why they deny the migrants the right to protest in any language other than English. Their “silence” is ensured by denying them a “voice”.

Throughout the novel Patrick is shown to be withdrawn and like his father, “abashed”. This characteristic of his parallels the silenced voices in history.

When Patrick shows him the photograph Temelcoff realises he has a place in history: “Nicholas is aware of himself standing there within the pleasure of recall. It is something new to him. This is what history means ... Patrick's gift, that arrow into the past, shows him the wealth in himself, how he has been sewn into history. Now he will begin to tell stories” (p. 149). In an intratextual echo of Gilgamesh, Patrick has fired off an arrow that has found its mark.

Alice's silent puppet show, the most dramatic metaphor of the migrant experience in the book, demonstrates the impotence of those without a language. The forty small puppets whose “costumes [were a] blend of several nations” (p. 116), represent the marginalised immigrants. The life-sized puppet who, as “the hero linked them all” (p. 116), “could say nothing” (p. 116) and is powerless in the face of “the authorities” (p. 117) who provide the only sounds on stage; “grunts of authority” (p. 117).

The metaphor that Ondaatje uses of donning the skin of a lion is referred to by Alice in a neat example of reflexivity when she instructs Patrick after the puppet show, “you reach people through metaphor” (p. 123).

And by utilising and manipulating the form of the novel and the techniques of the novelist, Ondaatje has achieved just this. He has reached us, his readers, through the language of metaphor.

Students should make a list of the authorial voice's explicit references to the power of language. Here are a few:

Page 43: Ondaatje tells us that “the event that will light the way for immigration in North America is the talking picture. The silent film brings nothing but entertainment—a pie in the face, a fop being dragged by a bear out of a department store—all events governed by fate and timing, not language and argument. The tramp never changes the opinion of the policeman.”

Language, it is implied, is the means by which authority can be challenged.

Page 46: Patrick's realisation that without the power of language “he would be lost”.

Page 149: Nicholas Temelcoff will now “begin to tell stories”.

Ondaatje's structural technique of creating “five or six people interweaving and treading kind of parallel lines, but somehow connected at certain times” illuminates his thematic purpose of representing the lives and motives of the disenfranchised and powerless. The self-conscious interconnectedness of the narrative is expressed by the omniscient author's intervention into the narrative where he draws attention to his control over his characters' destiny:

In books he had read, even those romances he swallowed during childhood, Patrick never believed that characters lived only on the page. They altered when the author's eye was somewhere else. Outside the plot there was a great darkness, but there would of course be daylight elsewhere on earth. Each character had his own time zone, his own lamp, otherwise they were just men from nowhere. (p. 143)

It is the author “accompanying their heroes clarif[ying] motives” (p. 82) that we see in this chapter. Patrick, who has always been an outsider, a quiet “searcher”, an “alien, the third person in the picture. He is the one born in this country who knows nothing of the place. He was a watcher ... ”(pp.156–7), and like “water ... easily harnessed” (p. 122) discovers, in an epiphanous moment, that he is indeed part of a community and is transformed from a passive observer into an active participant:

He walked on beyond the sound of the street musicians, aware once again of the silence between his individual steps, knowing now he could add music by simply providing the thread of a hum. He saw the interactions, saw how each one of them was carried by the strength of something more than themselves ... His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a wondrous night web—all of these fragments of a human order ... the detritus and chaos of the age was realigned. (pp. 144–5)

Ondaatje presents his story in a style that moves away from a more traditional simple linear cause and effect narrative to a more fragmented and multi-layered narrative. The result is a loose structure—the “web” that Patrick realises he is part of—of threads woven together to form a connectedness with layers of symbolic meaning.

Ondaatje's deliberate employment of this narrative method allows him to reveal to the reader his view of history as a linking of time and place through the linking of characters, rather than a linear model of chronologically informed cause and effect manipulated by those in authority.

By employing this technique Ondaatje is resisting the official authoritative version of history. There are many stories, or histories, to be told and Ondaatje has foregrounded the experiences of these specific workers in this specific time and place. (Ondaatje's “moment of cubism” on page 34, an intertextual reference to John Berger's own “moment of cubism”). At the end of the novel, Ondaatje reminds us of his purpose by pointing to other stories that have equal claim to be told. As Patrick and Hana leave for their journey to Marmora, the narrator tells us that:

the houses at this hour, beautiful and large, stray lights on within them, and he could see the faint interiors, their privacy and character revealed, each room a subplot
(p. 243).

By championing the cause of these immigrant workers, Ondaatje has created a context which is a mix of class commentary and political analysis. When we consider the political as the authoritative allocation of values, we can see the world of the novel as intensely political. We are reminded that class, like other aspects of human identity, is constructed.

Ondaatje's poetic style stems partially from the fact that he is a poet (In the Skin of a Lion was his first full length novel). The novel is informed by patterns of imagery and symbols, the effect of which is to give the reader an aesthetic perspective which stands in contrast to the type of realist novel where the psychological idiom predominates. The books indeterminacies invite the reader to fill in the gaps. The reader engages with the characters in a more dynamic manner than would have been the case if all psychological angles had been covered by the author, and the characters laid out before us, revealed in their entirety. Thus Ondaatje has contrived a narrative style which complements, both structurally and thematically, his overall aim of opening up history to interpretation. We come to realise, through his style of writing, that there are as many meanings as there are readers: of his novel and, allegorically, of history.

Students should also examine the cinematic or dramatic construction of the novel: theatre, film, choreography, photography and painting are continually referred to throughout the novel. Also note how Ondaatje refers to lighting throughout, almost as if he is providing the lighting directions for each scene—and of course the final word of the novel is “lights”. The light imagery reminds us that it is what is highlighted that we focus on and what is in the shadow has its own equal claim to legitimacy; all that is required is a shift in light or perspective to bring it onto centre stage so to speak. Thus the light imagery functions on a thematic level as well as a structural level in that it reminds us of how perspective can give voice to the hidden or “shadowed” voices of history. The character, Caravaggio, whose occupation as a thief is regularly described as an art in itself, gets his name from the renaissance painter, Caravaggio, who was famous for his chiaroscuro techniques.

By blurring the boundaries between historical fact, narrative fiction and autobiography, and combining poetic language with social documentation and social commentary, Ondaatje has succeeded in creating a novel that is as richly layered as his characters are defiantly mysterious.

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