Michael Ondaatje by Douglas Barbour

Abstract

anglophones rather than to only the ethnically English or if there is any difference in the prestige Canadians in general attach to English or Scottish origin — or Dutch or Scandinavian. As an unwilling beneficiary of whatever advantages Englishness brings I am the wrong person to ask, but I would guess that Morris dancing these days confers about as much social prestige as wearing a helicopter beanie. Greenhill refers a few times to the Bakhtinian notion of the carnivalesque, carnival as politically subversive. She claims that the ethnically English “are located solely in the domains of power” because they have been seen “as lacking carnivalesque traditions” (4). I would have liked to see this discussion expanded, especially in the concluding chapter. Greenhill defines ethnic Englishness in relation to a group of chosen activ­ ities and observances. It would be fascinating and politically important to continue her work by looking at the way it is defined by other ethnic groups, all the time, of course, being very precise about which of the many meanings of Englishness is in play. julie b e d d o e s / University of Saskatchewan Douglas Barbour, Michael Ondaatje (New York: Twayne, 1993). xiv, 247. $29.95 Douglas Barbour’s opening epigraphs to his new book on Michael Ondaatje are appropriately quirky. He cites a passage from the 1970 issue of Cana­ dian Who’s Who that identifies Ondaatje not as a poet (he had by this time published two books of poetry) but rather as the mastermind behind a new strain of spaniel. In the second epigraph Barbour cites Ondaatje as claim­ ing, “I’m a great believer in the mongrel.” These epigraphs reflect Barbour’s fine and confident, and canny, grasp of Ondaatje’s work as a poet, novelist, dramatist, filmmaker, and editor. To date Ondaatje criticism has been lim­ ited to two book length studies: Leslie Mundwiler’s largely phenomenologi­ cal (although admittedly eclectic) and theoretically dense Michael Ondaatje: Word, Image, Imagination published almost ten years ago (1984) and Sam Solecki’s edited collection of essays and interviews, Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje (1985). Very few of the essays published after these works in the mid-eighties, moreover, deal with Ondaatje’s later work, and thus, with Linda Hutcheon as a notable exception, Barbour’s study offers one of the first serious treatments of Ondaatje’s later works. It is the first book length study to be published on Ondaatje’s work as a whole in almost ten years. 106 Barbour chooses to divide his chapters according to Ondaatje’s individual works with an introductory chapter briefly situating Ondaatje’s writing in a theoretical context. This context is multifold, from specific critics like Marjorie Perloff (in relation to Ondaatje’s poetry) and Mikhail Bakhtin (in relation to the longer narrative works) to critical movements from modernism to postmodernism and postcolonialism. Marjorie Perloff’s able and incisive approach to postmodernist poetics is a welcome context for a discussion of Ondaatje’s work and leads to Barbour’s argument that Ondaatje “begins as a writer in the Stevens tradition, as a modernist lyricist, and generally remains true to that tradition in his shorter poems before Secular Love. In his longer works, Ondaatje not only joins the Pound tradition, but also becomes a specifically postmodern writer” (6). It would have been useful, however, if Barbour had developed the reference to Perloff in a more sustained manner. Indeed, this book is weakest in its attempt to integrate the various theoretical positions with Ondaatje’s work itself. Most critics are not likely to take issue with the claim that Ondaatje is a postmodern writer, for example, but the suggestion that In the Skin of a Lion is “truly postcolonial in both subject matter and approach” (5) needs to be elaborated in considerably more detail. The representation of immigrant experience is surely not enough to make this novel postcolonial (179), and yet its other postcolonial characteristic — its challenge to the “official, politicians’ version of truth” (179) — does not significantly distinguish it from Barbour’s definition of the postmodern. And the explicitly political thrust with which postcolonial writing is aligned in Barbour’s text is itself undercut in several of...