Fiction

Established Fiction

‘“Giving style” to one’s character – a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.’ Nietzsche’s comments about the unsettled nature and therefore the malleability of one’s temperament, his exhortation to be muses to ourselves, that as human beings we are works of art in process, have been quoted and deployed extensively. Of course, his ‘character’ is not meant metaphorically. Nietzsche is talking about character as in Goethe’s character, not as in the character of Young Werther or Faust. But I have been looking for a productive way to approach the most dominant and daunting of the novels and collections of stories published in 2007: Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero, perhaps his masterpiece so far. Even a preliminary mapping of the novel entails a route that of necessity is through the overheated and spottily desiccated territory staked out in some of the dominant reviews of the book, most notably by Louis Menand in the New Yorker.

Menand calls his piece, in bold, ‘the aesthete,’ with the subtitle, ‘The Novel and Michael Ondaatje,’ which is the first of the numerous dissociations between this writer and the thing we all understand, or should understand, the word novel to be. Only people who live with books and make their living from them can transform the designations of ‘literary’ and ‘aesthete’ into a code for deficiencies ranging from self-indulgence to historical and political betrayal. As always, Menand’s turns of phrase are admirable for their poise and sound, but in reality they are syntactically elegant howls of indignation at Ondaatje’s tampering with the form of the novel. Starting with In the Skin of a Lion, Ondaatje ‘maintained only a loose sense of obligation to the requirements of continuity and closure . . . The sacrifice of plot [in Divisadero] is tolerable, and despite the willful digressions, traces of plot and even suspense are usually there in Ondaatje’s fiction. What is damaging is the sacrifice of character. His characters are ciphers. We have no affective connection with them.’ Revisiting, as one should with ease, Ulysses, The Waves, Women in Love, and Gravity’s Rainbow, one reads words such as obligation, requirements, and the sacrifice of character with special bafflement and even distaste. One should also recall that ninety-seven years before the publication of Divisadero, ‘human character changed,’ on December 1910, as Virginia Woolf declared with dazzling precision. Oddly, Menand has lapsed in his obligation to recognize the ongoing complexities of this date and its ramifications for the creation of character in fiction, whereas all of Ondaatje’s work is a testament to a border designed to highlight a lack of borders. ‘Characters in a novel,’ Irving Howe said in ‘The Culture of Modernism,’ are ‘no longer . . . fixed and synthetic entities, with a set of traits available through notations of conduct and reports of psychic condition.’ Character for the novelist is ‘a psychic battlefield or an insoluble puzzle, or the occasion for a flow of perceptions and sensations.’ Nietzsche’s imperative call for the stylization of character should be extended to a melding of life-character and narrative-character, to the celebration of their perpetual metamorphosis. Elliptical as are Ondaatje’s characters and the pages that they frequent, he has been consistently direct about the nature of his narrative art. He invokes the layering of collage, the patterns of mosaic, and he endows his characters – who often become what they become without our being shown sequentially how they become – with perceptions of stories curling backwards, of deferrals, vanishings, and reappearances. ‘Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and the order it will become . . . The first sentence of every novel should be: “Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town.”‘Thus speaks In the Skin of a Lion. Divisadero...