A hearty welcome to Seattle-based writer Jonathan Crimmins, author of this post, who will lead us into temptation–and through his reading of Ondaatje’s recently released Divisadero–in the coming weeks.–TM
Let’s start with Michael Ondaatje, and let the double a stand for his two selves. Of course, we are all two selves; the writer is simply that look in the mirror made literal and literary. Ondaatje’s two selves are many. For instance, he is a man and a writer, a poet and a novelist, a Canadian and a Sri Lankan. You see how it works: a bifocalism that is the source of our depth perception. A while ago, it occurred to me that binocular vision might be a good metaphor for how Ondaatje makes metaphors. Begin with a simple metaphorical lub-dub like the heart is a bomb, as in the English Patient. Then literalize the metaphor by describing bombs as they actually are. Portray Kip the sapper and his preternatural defusing of bombs. Throughout the novel, keep one eye on the metaphor and one eye on the real, and watch the two-dimensional deepen into a metaphorical field of vision.
In the history of the novel, this technique was developed with abandon by Herman Melville. If, for convenience sake, we think of Hawthorne as moving the realm of allegory from the fantastic to the psychological, then we can think of Melville as performing a similar transposition from the psychological to the real. In terms of our metaphor, Melville creates a technique in which the eye on the real is given precedence over the metaphorical. The opposite is true in this post; the metaphor is explanatory rather than exploratory. Instead of exploring the real features of binocular vision in order to discover unexpected associations, I have reduced it to its major feature and held that feature steady for clarity’s sake.
Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be reading Ondaatje’s newest novel Divisadero, and will record some thoughts about the novel and the rest of his oeuvre, including, with luck, ideas about the literary magic between the numbers 2 and 3.