Gazing from a Distance: Ondaatje’s Divisadero as Cubist Collage

Abstract

“Everything is collage,” (16) declares Canadian poet-novelist Michael Ondaatje in his 2007 hybrid narrative Divisadero, and a strong argument can be made for Divisadero taking Pablo Picasso’s 1913 Cubist collage Guitar as its primary framing device. Ondaatje’s methods of adopting and adapting the concepts of a visual medium to the printed page require not only the play of simultaneity and fragmentation that are among his more familiar themes, but also a fresh concern with the spatial and temporal positionality of the reader as a viewer of the novel’s unfolding events. This paper provides a close reading of three predominant images in both Divisadero and Guitar―a guitar, glass, and a blue table―in relation to the precepts of synthetic Cubism, and reinforces the potentiality that interdisciplinary art offers in respect to the complexities of reflection and recognition across differences of form.