In the Skin of a Lion as a Cubist Novel

ROCHELLE SIMMONS In the Skin of a Lion as a Cubist Novel I'm drawn to a form that can have a ... cubist or mural voice to capture the variousness of things. 'Michael Ondaatje: An Interview/ 248 In a 1984 interview/ Michael Ondaatje declared that he would Ipick up and read anything byJohn Berger' (328). Although some critics have taken note of this interest, they have not explored the dense web of intertextual reference to Berger's writing that can be discerned in Ondaatje's novel In the Skin of a Lion.1 Yet, this text refers directly to works by Berger on a couple of occasions. One of two epigraphs is taken from Berger's novel G.: 'Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one' (149). Ondaatje also weaves the title of an art criticism essay by Berger into his narrative when he describes Nicholas Temelcoff building the Prince Edward Viaduct: 'He floats at the three hinges of the crescent-shaped steel arches. These knit the bridge together. The moment of Cubism' (34). Berger ,wrote an account of Cubist painting called The Moment of Cubism/ which was published in a collection of the same name (1969). Far from being incidental to In the Skin ofa Lion, I will argue that these two references form the basis for considering this a Cubist novel after Berger.l For, just as G. could be said to translate Berger's perceptions about Cubist painting into novelistic form, echoing them verbally and conceptually, to the extent that G. becomes a literary Cubist work/ so too does Ondaa~e's narrative echo Berger's art critical and fictional interpretations of Cubism. By categorizing In the Skin of a Lion as a Cubist novel, I do not wish to imply that such a classification provides an exhaustive description of the visual characteristics of Ondaatje's text. Rather, these Cubist qualities should been seen as part of an intense and unwavering fascina tion with the visual in Ondaatje's work in general and this novel in particular. For example, In the Skin ofa Lion contains numerous biographical and pictorial 1 Others have remarked on Ondaatje's intertextual method. See, for example, Acheson (107) and Duffy (135). 2 This article is a revised and expanded version of a paper called 'The Influence of John Berger's J'The Moment of CubismJJ on Michael Ondaatje's 111 the Skin of a Lion/ which I presented at the Canadian Comparative Literature Association conference in 1989. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 67J NUMBER 3, SUMMER 1998 700 ROCHELLE SIMMONS references to the Italian Baroque painterCaravaggio, a subject towhich two articles have been devoted.) Hence, this analysis of the Cubist aspects of In the Skin ofa Lion attempts to explore Ondaatje's interest in the visual from another perspective, and, in that process, to examine Ondaalje's intertextual relationship with Berger's writing. Together with his book The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965), 'The Moment of Cubism' constitutes some of Berger's most trenchant and innovative art criticism. Written from a Marxist perspective, these works attempt to demystify their subjects and to situate them within a historical, social, and political context. Instead of proceeding by way of linear argument, for example, 'The Moment of Cubism' takes its methodological cues from Cubist painting itself: it juxtaposes blocks of material, thereby enabling Berger to mediate between differentlevels of experience. As Ihave argued at length elsewhere, Berger's novel G., which was written between 1965 and 1971, functions as both a Marxist modernist and a literary Cubist narrative.4 Besides drawing extensively upon Berger's art critical writings, G. also fulfils canonical definitions of literary Cubism. Although Cubist writing is notoriously difficult to define, In the Skin of a Lion does display what Wendy Steiner sees as the two central aspects of the Cubist analogy in her book The Colors of Rhetoric (1982): stylistic parallelism and a comparison of ideologies. Steiner uses the term 'stylistic parallelism' to refer to 'the matching of technical elements of painting with those in writing' (179). She provides a list of features that is useful for comparing the" stylistic aspects of painting...