“Black Space Is Time:” Intermediality, Narrative, and Community in Michael Ondaatje
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2017.i10.523Abstract
This essay proposes to explore some aspects and implications of intermediality in three novels by Michael Ondaatje: In the Skin of a Lion (1987), The English Patient (1992), and Divisadero (2007); more specifically, my focus is on the exchange involving literature and the two visual codes of painting and photography. I especially underline two possible configurations of a reiterated light/darkness interplay which traverses Ondaatje’s oeuvre. On the one hand, light and darkness mirror each other as extreme poles which blend, in concrete, in infinite shades of grey, mirroring a photographic process; on the other hand, darkness surrounds, in a Caravaggesque fashion, pools of light illuminating fleeting moments in time; the latter configuration is also, to an extent, ante litteram photographic. What should be crucially emphasized in reading Ondaatje is the complex temporal quality of the dark spaces inevitably surrounding the moments of light. In a meta-literary and meta-narrative fashion, intermedial gestures appear to be necessary to the very possibility of narration, to its onward movement in space and time; at the same time, these gestures always entail a level of “fecund invisibility”. In Ondaatje’s literary narrative, the possibility, for various beings (human as well as nonhuman), events, and medial codes to exist next to each other, without one forcefully assimilating the other, is predicated on a Benjaminian kind of historical materialism in which darkness is the indispensable space/time wherein the actions of the present resonate and acquire (historical) meaning.References
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---. Homo Sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita. Torino: Einaudi, 1995.
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---. Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis. New York and London: Routledge, 1996.
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---. “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” Intermédialités 6 (Automne 2005): 43-64.
---. Intermedialität. Tübingen and Basel: Francke, 2002.
Sarris, Fotios. In the Skin of a Lion: Michael Ondaatje’s Tenebristic Narrative.” Essays on Canadian Writing 44 (Fall 1991): 183-201. Humanities Source, EBSCOhost (Last visited March 15, 2015).
Simmons, Rochelle. “In the Skin of a Lion as a Cubist Novel.” University of Toronto Quarterly 67.3 (1998): 699-714.
Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.
Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London: Verso, 2002.
---. Homo Sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita. Torino: Einaudi, 1995.
Baetens, Jan, and Mieke Bleyen. “Photo Narrative, Sequential Photography, Photonovels.” Intermediality and Storytelling. Eds. Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure Ryan. Göttingen: De Gruyter, 2010. 165-82.
Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Third Edition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.
---. Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
---. The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.
---. Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis. New York and London: Routledge, 1996.
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. 253-64.
Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000.
Breitbach, Julia. Analog Fictions for the Digital Age: Literary Realism and Photographic Discourses in Novels after 2000. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012.
Curran, Beverley. “Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Altered States of Narrative.” Comparative Cultural Studies and Michael Ondaatje’s Writing. Ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005. 16-26.
Davey, Frank. Post-National Arguments: The Politics of the Anglophone Novel since 1967. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.
Foucault, Michel. Il governo di sé e degli altri. Corso al Collège de France (1982-1983). Milano: Feltrinelli, 2009.
---. Discorso e verità nella Grecia antica. Roma: Donzelli, 2005.
Goldman, Marlene. “‘Powerful Joy:’ Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Walter Benjamin’s Allegorical Way of Seeing.” University of Toronto Quarterly 70.4 (2001): 902-922.
Grishakova, Marina and Marie-Laure Ryan. “Editor’s Preface.” Intermediality and Storytelling. Göttingen: De Gruyter, 2010. 1-7.
Ingelbien, Raphaël. “A Novelist’s Caravaggism: Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion.” The Guises of Canadian Diversity: New European Perspectives / Les Masques de la diversité canadienne: Nouvelles Perspectives Européennes. Eds. Serge Jaumain and Marc Maufort. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995. 27-37.
Marchesoni, Stefano. “Parrhesia e forma-di-vita: soggettivazione e desoggettivazione in Michel Foucault e Giorgio Agamben.” Noema 4.1 (2013): 75-83.
Marinkova, Milena. Michael Ondaatje: Haptic Aesthetics and Micropolitical Writing. New York and London: Continuum Books, 2011.
Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994.
---. Iconology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Ondaatje, Michael. Divisadero. (2007) London: Bloomsbury, 2008.
---. The English Patient. 1992 New York: Vintage International, 1996.
---. In the Skin of a Lion. 1987 New York: Penguin, 1988.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1996 “The Surprise of the Event.” Being Singular Plural. Trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O'Byrne. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Paech, Joachim and Jens Schröter, eds. Intermedialität analog/digital: Theorien, Methoden, Analysen. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2008.
Rajewski, Irina O. “Border Talks: The Problematic Status of Media Borders in the Current Debate about Intermediality.” Media Borders: Multimodality and Intermediality. Ed. Lars Elleström. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 51-68.
---. “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” Intermédialités 6 (Automne 2005): 43-64.
---. Intermedialität. Tübingen and Basel: Francke, 2002.
Sarris, Fotios. In the Skin of a Lion: Michael Ondaatje’s Tenebristic Narrative.” Essays on Canadian Writing 44 (Fall 1991): 183-201. Humanities Source, EBSCOhost (Last visited March 15, 2015).
Simmons, Rochelle. “In the Skin of a Lion as a Cubist Novel.” University of Toronto Quarterly 67.3 (1998): 699-714.
Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.
Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London: Verso, 2002.
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2017-12-01
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