It Runs in the Family: A Reading of Michael Ondaatje's Secular Love

Abstract

On the basis of the poetry Michael Ondaatje published before Secular Love (1984), few readers would claim that it has much in common with confessional writing. If anything most of his earlier work stands opposed to the school=s constitutive assumptions, and even when his lyrics are personal, they are rarely intimate. The speaker in most of them seems to be Ondaatje but he=s rarely interested in dealing directly with his most personal and most problematic emotions and situations: the voice is too laconic, the tone too detached and the attitude to the self is ironic, even selfmocking. Yet we often sense that the artifice and control not only shape and present the material at hand but simultaneously hint at repressed or displaced experiences and aspects of the self with which the writer is unwilling or unable to deal. Ondaatje=s suicidal herons and artists, his fascination with the jungle, the various hints at autobiography in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1969), >Letters & Other Worlds= and Coming through Slaughter (1976) B three studies in pathological creativity B all point obliquely or symbolically to the pressure of personal events on the work. Without resorting to a confessional aesthetic, Coming through Slaughter, his novel about a jazz cornetist whose obsessive art leads to silence and madness, and the crucial lyrics >Letters & Other Worlds,= >Burning Hills,= and >White Dwarfs= certainly reveal a compulsive fascination with an intensely subjective and directly expressive art. But in these works a confessional approach is not part of what Helen Vendler, referring to other poets, calls >the structural and symbolic aesthetic strategies to which [he] has been driven in coping ... [with] some personal donnee which the poet could not avoid treating= (xii). The local donnee in Secular Love is a love affair and the breakup of a marriage. And the >aesthetic strategies= show Ondaatje