BECOMING CANADIAN:

NARRATING NATIONAL IDENTITY THROUGH THE HISTORY OF ELSEWHERE

A Thesis

Presented to

The Faculty of Graduate Studies

of

The University of Guelph

by

VANESSA PARKS

In partial fulfilment of requirements

for the degree of

Master of Arts

June, 2008

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While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires in the document page count, aient inclus dans la pagination, their removal does not represent il n'y aura aucun contenu manquant. any loss of content from the thesis. Canada ABSTRACT

BECOMING CANADIAN:

NARRATING NATIONAL IDENTITY THROUGH THE HISTORY OF ELSEWHERE

Vanessa Parks Advisor: University of Guelph, 2008 Professor Ajay Heble

This thesis is an investigation of the ways in which Canadian historical fiction that deals with non-Canadian history comments on or contributes to a changing sense of

Canadian national identity. Through a close examination Michael Ondaatje's Coming

Through Slaughter and Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey. I argue that narratives that take the history of elsewhere as subject suggest a formulation of identity that is not only multicultural, but also international, and thus challenge singular, conventional notions of what it means to be Canadian. As the nation is steeped in plurality and diversity, any formulation of identity in the Canadian context must constantly negotiate between various subjectivities. In this sense, Canada and its citizens are never fixed or absolute, but always engaged in the process of becoming Canadian. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the various people who have guided me through and otherwise been involved in this project, especially Ajay Heble, whose generous support and guidance made this work possible.

I would also like to thank my parents for their ongoing support and encouragement.

i TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Abstract

Acknowledgments i

Table of Contents ii

INTRODUCTION

Being Canadian?: Redefining History and Nation 1

CHAPTER ONE

"Stray Fact, Manic Theories, and Well-Told Lies": Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter as (Auto)Biographical Sub-History .... 18

CHAPTER TWO

"A Tale That Defied Genre": History and Nation in Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey 50

CHAPTER THREE

Getting From Here to There: Between National Borders and History From Elsewhere 84

CONCLUSION

Becoming Canadian: Positioning Canadian Historical Fiction 110

Works Cited 117

ii INTRODUCTION

Being Canadian?:

Redefining History and Nation

Despite the shifting terms of its definition, Canadian identity continues to be a national preoccupation that directs a great deal of attention to the consideration of

Canadian literature as a means through which to understand the unique position of the nation and its people. The prevalence of historical fiction or historical narratives in the

Canadian literary canon further suggests an association among national identity, literature, and history. Critic Herb Wyile argues that "of the current generation of

[Canadian] novelists,... a conspicuous portion write about the past" (Speaking 2). This interest in history is not, however, unique to contemporary Canadian fiction. In his 1965 conclusion to the Literary History of Canada. Northrop Frye suggests that "the Canadian literary mind... was established on a basis... of history" (835) and that writers are "trying to assimilate the Canadian environment" through, among other things, a "fixation on [the nation's] past"; for Frye, the Canadian nation is unified through its attention to history in its attempt to answer the question "Where is here?" (826). What is new to contemporary examples of historical fiction, however, is the manner in which these narratives deal with the past: they challenge how history is conceived as well as what can or should be considered part of a specifically Canadian past.

If Canadian national identity is founded in part, as Frye asserts, on the notion of a shared history, then a reformulation of the way in which history is understood and

1 defined will, in turn, have an effect on the understanding and definition of national identity. This reformulation of history takes two distinct but related forms. First, the way in which the historical record or archive is ordered and invested with meaning has changed in such a way as to cast into doubt our ability unproblematically to access the past and, in so doing, has also emphasized the narrative or imaginative elements of historiography. Second, the multicultural situation of the Canadian nation has expanded the definition of Canada's past to include the histories of its diverse population, and thus also raises questions regarding what can be included in a particularly Canadian historical record and what to do with historical material that does not deal explicitly with the physical Canadian nation. What emerges from this historical reformulation is a notion of nation that, rather than remaining fixed in a particular place, transcends geographical boundaries and works to redefine conventional understandings of national community.

As examples of historical fiction, Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter and Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey - both individually and in dialogue with one another - take up these issues of historical understanding and definition. These texts deal with historical material that is distinctly non-Canadian in their efforts to explore the manner in which historiography communicates meaning. In satisfying the two categories of historical reformulation suggested above, these texts work to problematize any simple or singular connection between Canadian national identity and history. Ondaatje's and

Mistry's narratives suggest that being Canadian involves more than place (or the history of that place) and thus challenge fixed and singular notions of what it means to be

Canadian in the contemporary world.

2 Redefining Historical Narrative

As historical fiction, Coming Through Slaughter and Such a Long Journey blur the conventionally perceived distinction between historical accuracy and fictional construction. As I will argue in the chapters that follow, these texts emphasize this loss of distinction in order to maintain the multiplicity and fragmentation of historical interpretation rather than attempting to distill these interpretations into a singular understanding of the past. This approach to history is not unique to historical fiction, but is also a trend of historical narrative more generally; however, as historical fiction bridges the gap between history and fiction, it is in a unique position to comment upon the overlap between these two modes of writing. In its efforts to reformulate how we understand history, historical fiction works to re-imagine the nation as well. Thus, I will begin by reviewing some of the key critical and theoretical material that informs my argument regarding the interpretive nature of historical narrative.

Over the course of the past several decades, historiographical analysis based on the objective and scientific gathering and ordering of historical information has shifted to a process of historical interpretation that is intensely aware of the role of narrative and invention in the mediation and presentation of archival materials. Historiography - or, more simply, historical writing - no longer claims the objectivity of traditional historical narratives. Historian Hayden White has commented at length on the ways in which historiography has been formulated and reformulated. In Metahistory: The Historical

Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, he states that what is striking about the historiography of this period is that almost all its representatives "were inspired by the

3 hope of creating a perspective on the historical process that would be as 'objective' as that from which scientists viewed the process of nature and as 'realistic' as that from which... statesmen... directed the fortunes of nations" (39). In the nineteenth century, historiography was understood as an objective, scientific representation of past events.

However, White also acknowledges that "the consistent elaborations of a number of equally comprehensive and plausible, yet apparently mutually exclusive, conceptions of the same sets of events was enough to undermine confidence in history's claims to

'objectivity,' 'scientiticity,' and 'realism'" (Metahistory. 41). For historians of the nineteenth century, objective historiography was already becoming problematic; for historiographers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, historiography has evolved into a form that not only explores the past, but also explores the manner in which that past comes to have meaning in the present.

This reformulation of the meaning and role of historiography in the representation and interpretation of the past both evolves from and opposes more traditional or conventional modes of historical analysis. In "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Michel

Foucault outlines what he terms "effective history," a type of historical analysis that

"differs from traditional history in being without constraints" and through which "the traditional devices for constructing a comprehensive view of history and for retracing the past as a patient and continuous development must be systematically dismantled" (153).

Effective history insists that "the forces operating in history are not controlled by destiny or regulative mechanisms, but respond to haphazard conflicts" (Foucault 154) and thus suggests a formulation of history that resists conventional historical reconstruction by pointing to the narrative ordering of this reconstruction. As effective history "uproot[s]

4 its traditional foundations and relentlessly disrupt[s] its pretended continuity" (Foucault

154), it both stems from and stands in contrast to more conventional modes of historical representation.

Marie Vautier offers an historiographic analysis that explores some of these same issues by shifting focus from history to myth in order to "assert... opposition to the

European-inspired versions of the past(s)" (x) that is "marked by the deliberate intention to break with... historical traditions" (6) and thus can be understood in relation to

Foucault's effective history. However, Vautier's argument is particularly relevant for my purposes here not in terms of her similarity to Foucault, but instead for her insistence that

"myth can be described as in a perpetual state of coming-into-being" (x, emphasis mine).

While I do not focus in particular on myth, this concept can shed some light on my objectives here. As I am exploring what it means to be Canadian, Vautier's suggestion that myth never is but instead is always "coming-into-being" indicates an understanding of the past that is not fixed to a single, stable interpretation. As I will explain in more detail further on, it is my contention that Canadian identity is similarly caught up in the process (rather than the definition) of being.

If historiography is being reformulated in the terms outlined by White, Foucault, and Vautier, then attention to the specific features of contemporary historiography becomes relevant to my study here. One of the means through which historiography is

being refigured is via a redefinition of fact and fiction, as well as a reformulation of the relationship between these concepts. In an essay appropriately entitled "The Fictions of

Factual Representation," White argues that "we are no longer compelled... to believe - as historians of the post-Romantic period had to believe - that fiction is the antithesis of

5 fact" (29). Instead, by acknowledging that historical narrative includes a degree of narrative or imaginative ordering or sense-making of historical material, fact and fiction - the real and the imaginary - become equally involved in, and relevant to, any discussion of history. In his forward to a collection of essays in which White's work appears, Angus

Fletcher argues that the "literary imagination is always somehow concerned with reality; that is, literature can hardly be disconnected from fact" (vi). Fletcher asserts that, rather than being concerned only with imaginative events, fiction or literature, in some sense, is also caught up in the facts of the real world. In The Content of the Form, White outlines the flip side of this argument by suggesting that, alternatively, the facts of history are presented through narrative that is influenced by fiction. He argues that, traditionally,

"the difference between 'history' and 'fiction' resides in the fact that the historian 'finds' his stories, whereas the fiction writer 'invents' his," but warns that "this conception of the historian's task... obscures the extent to which 'invention' also plays a part in the historian's operations" (Content 6-7). In an effort to reformulate how history and historiography are understood and practiced, critics have worked to redefine the relationship between fact and fiction in such a way as to suggest, as E.L. Doctorow asserts, that "there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative" (231). In current historiography, fact and fiction are neither directly opposed nor interchangeable; instead, the relationship between them is both dynamic and dependent.

What emerges from this breakdown of the binary distinction between fact and fiction is a formulation of truth that is no longer reliant on simple adherence to factual representation. Conventionally, truth is measured by the degree to which any narrative

6 accurately corresponds to events in the so-called real world. However, as Barbara Foley suggests in her book entitled Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary

Fiction, the contemporary historical narrative (what she refers to as the documentary novel) "is as preoccupied with telling the truth as were its forebears, but questions whether this truth has much to do with 'the facts'" (186). Indeed, as the binary relationship between fact and fiction is questioned, so also is the degree to which truth may be associated with the revelation of historical fact. Instead, truth is a less tangible concept caught between the definition and exploration of the factual and the fictional.

White points to the problematic distinction between fact and fiction as it relates to historical narrative when he asks, "how else can any past, which by definition comprises events, processes, structures, and so forth, considered to be no longer perceivable, be represented in either consciousness or discourse except in an 'imaginary' way?" (Content

57). White's suggestion that no narrative, whether factual or fictional, can clearly access the past points to the degree to which truth, in the conventional sense, is difficult - if not impossible - to locate. This difficulty creates the space in which alternative understandings of what is and can be true emerge.

It follows, therefore, that the connection between truth and reality - and the subsequent distinction between truth and fiction - cannot be simply articulated. In his acknowledgements at the end of Coming Through Slaughter. Ondaatje asserts that, in the preceding narrative, "some facts have been expanded or polished to suit the truth of fiction" (163, emphasis mine). As I will discuss at greater length in my first chapter,

Ondaatje's use of truth is not simply what Frye refers to as a "truth of correspondence" to actual historical events ("History" 12), but instead takes on a definition that is at once

7 concerned with the reality of the past and steeped in the fictional or narrative representation of that past. White asserts that "the very distinction between real and imaginary events that is basic to modern discussions of both history and fiction presupposes a notion of reality in which 'the true' is identified with 'the real' only insofar as it can be shown to possess the character of narrativity" (Content 6). Rather than connecting truth and reality, White complicates this relationship by inserting narrative between them. In this formulation, truth is not tied to factual accuracy, but encourages a simultaneous consideration of the role of narrative imagination. Thus, telling the truth about the past can be understood as a process steeped in both factual recognition and fictional construction. As reality and truth are no longer synonymous terms, narrative - whether fictional or factual - becomes able to tell the truth about the past. It is through this exploration of truth that historical narrative comes to reformulate the way we make sense of the past and the present.

Through the breakdown of the binary distinction between fact and fiction and the subsequent reformulation of the notion of truth, the new historiography expands to include narratives that may not necessarily hinge on their own factual accuracy. In this sense, historical exploration can be conducted not only through historical narrative, but also, and increasingly, through historical fiction. Wyile works to dissociate historical

fiction from the need to represent accurately and faithfully what is conventionally perceived as the knowable past by associating it with speculative fiction, or fiction about the future; he argues that

speculative fiction is not an objective, detached, authentic glimpse into the future,

but rather usually a very purposeful, subjective, and rhetorical extrapolation from

8 present circumstances, and the same might be said of historical fiction. Except, of

course, that it faces in the opposite direction. (Speculative xii)

I share with Wyile the assertion that historical fiction - or narratives about the past - are more about present conditions than they are about accurately representing history and, in this sense, they also explore the circumstances (cultural, social, and political) out of which they are produced. Further, by seeking to tell the truth about the past, historical fiction comments on the present, a rhetorical move which is made possible through the redefinition of historiography and its relationship to fact, fiction, and truth.

Redefining Canadian National Identity

When I argue that historical fiction can comment on the present, I am referring to the manner in which history informs our conceptualization of Canadian national identity.

Understanding "here" has come to include a consideration of how the history of here has

shaped a shared experience of here, but that experience, whether explored in terms of history or some other factor, remains transient and elusive. Benedict Anderson argues that

nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artifacts of a particular kind. To

understand them properly we need to carefully consider how they have come into

historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why,

today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy. (4)

If, as Anderson argues, national "communities are to be distinguished... by the style in

which they are imagined" (6), a consideration of the stories we tell about ourselves

9 becomes integral to an exploration of national identity. The difficulty with Canada,

however, is that these stories stubbornly refuse to be unified under any cohesive rubric of

national identification.

For decades, Canadian critics have sought to locate and define the Canadian

experience in the hopes that, as it is shared by the people of this country, it can also serve

to unify these people. Frye's work in the 1960s and 1970s has served as foundation and

fodder for much criticism subsequently produced regarding the definition of both

Canadian national literature and identity due to the manner in which it assertively and

decisively sought to provide a rubric through which Canadian identity could be read. In

the Literary History of Canada, Frye presents his clearest and most succinct assessment

of the connection between national identity and literature in Canada; he argues that

Canadian literature "is an indispensable aid to the knowledge of Canada" in that "it

records what the Canadian imagination has reacted to, and it tells us things about this

environment that nothing else will tell us" (822), an assertion that culminates in his

famous question "Where is here?" (826).

In her 1972 critical text Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature.

Margaret Atwood expands upon Frye's question by asking "Where is this place in

relation to other places?" and "How do I find my way around it?" (17). In Atwood's

view, Canada is both a physical reality and "a state of mind..., the space you inhabit not just with your body but with your head" (18). Like Frye, Atwood focuses on the shared

experiences and realities of life in Canada - the geography as well as the psychology of

the country - as that which defines a shared national identity. For Atwood, this identity

is constructed in relational opposition to elsewhere; in other words, Canadian identity is

10 Canadian precisely because it is not American, or Japanese, or anything else. "For the members of a country or a culture," she argues, "shared knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity" for survival (19). Frye and Atwood share a view of national identity that is firmly grounded in the concept of a shared experience of place which does not take into account the experiences the people of this nation may have had elsewhere, a view that is challenged in later criticism and fiction.

More recently, in an issue of Essays on Canadian Writing entitled Where is Here

Now?, Robert Lecker argues that '"where is here now?' is a question that can be answered with about as much certainty as it could be answered more than a generation ago; that is, with no certainty at all" (6). In "It's Time for a New Set of Questions," which appears in the same issue, Diana Brydon asserts that "the question has never been

'Where is here?'" but '"What are we doing here'? And that this question inevitably breeds others" (14). However, rather than merely positioning her argument in contradiction to Frye's, Brydon concerns herself with reformulating the critical approach that has been applied to Frye's assertion of Canadian nationalism; she suggests that "far too often [Frye's question] has been seen as an injunction to focus on place and even identity, as if they were fixed" (14) and that, if addressed from a different perspective, it can also "[suggest] a reciprocity between individual and place, implying that identity is not given but negotiated, interactive, and open to change" (16). Brydon points out that being Canadian is not fixed to a single place or the experience of that place; she thus opens the space in which this identity can be more broadly defined, allowing for explorations of identity that transcend the conventionally conceived borders of the nation.

Ajay Heble, for example, in his contribution to this issue, suggests that '"Where is here?'

11 is now perhaps best understood by looking at how models from elsewhere are helping to redefine the Canadian literary and cultural landscape" ("Sounds" 31-2); this idea is particularly resonant in the context of my argument here and is one which I will explore at greater length in the chapters that follow. These arguments make clear that "Where is here?" has become not so much a question of unification and identity as an opportunity to explore the various ways in which "here" is experienced. Critics such as Lecker, Brydon, and Heble create the space in which notions of "here" can be explored in relation to more than just a shared experience of environment.

Increasingly, then, "Where is here?" is a question of the cultural, social, and political situation of Canada instead of the physical reality of the nation. In the preface to his essay collection The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Frye further articulates his reading of Canadian identity by stating that "the question of Canadian identity, so far as it affects the creative imagination, is not a 'Canadian' question at all, but a regional question" (i-ii) and argues that, while "identity is local and regional... unity is national in reference" (ii). For Frye, the regional disparities of Canada create a conception of the nation that is founded on diversity, but what is more prevalent today than regional diversity is an emphasis on the diversity of the Canadian population.

Robert Kroetsch, for example, argues that "there is no centre. Our disunity is our unity"

(363). On a variety of levels, the Canadian nation resists clear and unilateral definition in favour of the multiple and fragmented, a situation from which unity, at least in terms of the uniformity of shared experience, has proven difficult to articulate.

What is common to both physical and social diversity is the reality that, in a nation as fragmented as Canada, it is difficult (if not impossible) to locate any one

12 commonality that can unequivocally unite the nation. This point recalls Foucault's concept of genealogy, which - in contrast to history - "opposes itself to the search for

'origins'" (140) and instead intends to "reveal the heterogeneous systems which, masked by the self, inhibit the formation of any form of identity" (162). As a way of reading the past, then, genealogy is concerned not with a teleological understanding of historical material, but instead with an interpretation of the archive that maintains the fragmentation of the historical record. Further, a historical paradigm that insists upon fragmentation and avoids originary material in turn resists the very unification that is essential to any notion of a shared national identity. In the sense that it resists the unification of a shared past, Canadian history can be understood as genealogy; Canadian genealogy, rather than confining itself to a fixed notion of identity, explores the multiplicity of possible identifications. These identifications are drawn from and defined in relation to the diversity of social and cultural realities of the Canadian population. Canadian history, then, is no longer formulated in simple reference to only dominant narratives of wilderness and settlement; instead, it is understood in relation to the various histories of the Canadian people.

Ondaatje. Mistrv. and (Canadian) Historical Fiction

Coming Through Slaughter and Such a Long Journey provide literary sites through which to explore what it means to broaden and reconsider the terms Canada has used to define itself, particularly those involving history. I have chosen to work with these narratives both because they are Canadian texts that deal with history and because

13 they deal with distinctly non-Canadian material. Ondaatje's and Mistry's narrative engagement with non-Canadian histories challenges conventional formulations of history and, by extension, traditional definitions of Canadian identity. Heble argues that

"books... set in countries other than Canada... invite compelling questions about what counts as Canadian history" ("Sounds" 27), questions that I will begin to explore here.

These examples of Canadian historical fiction are situated as Canadian while, at the same time, questioning what it means to be Canadian. Both fictional and factual, Canadian and non-Canadian, these texts work to examine and challenge how we understand ourselves.

The reformulation of historiography and historical representation that I am describing informs the national argument that is to follow and, as such, requires detailed attention early in this thesis. Coming Through Slaughter concerns itself in large part with how the past can be known and communicated through narrative. Its emphasis on multiplicity and fragmentation calls attention to the process of interpretation necessary for all historical reconstructions. In my first chapter, I will consider the ways in which

Ondaatje's narrative explores the multiplicity and fragmentation of history as a means of challenging both conventional forms of history-telling and dominant interpretations of that history. In its consideration of the legendary jazz musician Buddy Bolden,

Ondaatje's narrative deals with historical subject matter, but does so in a manner that unapologetically makes use of fictional elements and interpretations. Through my analysis of Ondaatje's narrative, I will suggest that Coming Through Slaughter is historical as well as fictional, and can therefore articulate the terms of a historical counter-narrative - or, what Ondaatje's novel refers to as sub-history. Considering the connection between history and nation that I have been describing here, I will argue that

14 this sub-history can impact constructions of national identity through its rearticulation of historiography.

Mistry's text more fully and overtly connects historical reformulation and national identity, and can thus be read as continuing the historical project suggested by Ondaatje's narrative by bringing the historical and the national into more direct dialogue. In my second chapter, I will continue to explore the model of historical alternatives suggested by Ondaatje's text by analyzing the way in which Such a Long Journey both grounds the nation in a notion of history, and unsettles the terms through which that history can be understood and defined, particularly in terms of multiculturalism. Homi K. Bhabha argues that "counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries - both actual and conceptual - disturb those ideological manoeuvers through which 'imagined communities' are given essentialist identities" (Location 213). For my purposes here, these "counter-narratives of nation" are closely tied to notions of historical interpretation, and can thus also be understood as historical counter-narratives. The historical reformulations that I am detailing here serve as counter-narratives of nation in the sense that they challenge the singular and decisive terms through which we have come to understand our history in connection with our national location. Thus, the re- articulation of both history and nation that stems from this historical reformulation upsets the notion of a Canada that can be defined in singular reference to a shared history or experience of the physical landscape. Instead, Canada and its history are multiple and fragmented - and thus open to a variety of definitions and understandings.

This multiplicity and fragmentation suggest, as Kroetsch and others would have it, that Canada has no centre of self-definition, except that which has been imposed upon

15 it. Thus, being Canadian does not refer to any one single identifier, but instead to multiple identifiers, a situation that calls into question the very possibility of ever truly being singularly Canadian. Instead, Canada is a nation whose self-definition is always in flux and constantly being reformulated to accommodate influences from both inside and outside the official borders of the nation. Canadian national identity, in its constant struggle to be, is continually in the process of being articulated, and therefore, always in a state of becoming. In this state, what it means to be Canadian never settles, but instead is defined and redefined in a variety of terms under different conditions. In my third chapter, I will look at Coming Through Slaughter and Such a Long Journey as liminal texts - texts poised between here and there, but firmly rooted in neither - as a means through which to elaborate on this notion of becoming Canadian. As texts positioned in- between this place and another, Ondaatje's and Mistry's narratives draw attention not only to the instability of Canadian national identity, but also to the impossibility of ever stabilizing that identity; what results is an analysis of Canada as process and formulated necessarily in reference to that which is outside or over there.

As Canadian self-definition requires attention both to that which is inside and that which is outside the physical borders of the nation, it cannot easily insist upon its isolation or independence from the rest of the world. Brydon argues that "being here and knowing here... are primarily important for how they shape the ethics of acting here, in this place and time" while also insisting that "our actions are constrained but not predetermined by our location" (14). This suggests that the internal situation of Canada structures both how we understand here and how we understand ourselves in relation to elsewhere. "The ethics of acting here," therefore, have as much to do with how we

16 function internally as with how we relate to other countries on the global stage. Put another way, Canada's unique position as a country defined by disunity rather than unity fosters a re-articulation of the relationship between the inside and the outside of the contemporary nation state.

It is my contention that a reconsideration of how we structure and communicate history provides the grounds on which to address larger issues of the connection between history and nation. As Canadian historical texts that take place elsewhere, Coming

Through Slaughter and Such a Long Journey engage with the notion that history serves as the foundation of national unity and, thus, that a reformulation of history in relation to nation can affect the ways in which that nation understands itself- and its place in the larger world. It is in the negotiation between here and there that Canada both articulates its own identity and defines its position in relation to other nations. My analysis therefore does not dismiss the importance of national definition, but instead looks to the ways in which the reformulation of the category of the national reflects and influences the contemporary world.

17 CHAPTER ONE

"Stray Facts, Manic Theories, and Well-Told Lies":

Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter as (Auto)Biographical Sub-History

The Cricket... took in and published all the information Bolden could find. It respected

stray facts, manic theories, and well-told lies.... [He] took all [these] thick facts and

dropped them into his pail of sub-history. (Slaughter 18)

Despite the fact that it deals explicitly with an historical figure and the archival materials surrounding that figure, Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter is not immediately recognizable as an example of historical narrative in that it does not conform to the expected appearance of this narrative mode. Rather than dealing with its historical subject in the objective, detached manner of conventional historiography, Ondaatje's narrative confuses the historical nature of the novel by drawing attention away from a singular, definitive interpretation of history. This does not, however, undermine the novel's status as historical narrative, but instead casts into doubt the very nature of such narratives and, more particularly, the manner in which they establish or determine historical truth. Coming Through Slaughter is, therefore, in a unique position to reformulate the way in which we conceive of history.

In that it works to challenge conventional historical understanding, Coming

Through Slaughter rearticulates the terms through which we understand the past in the present; as such, Ondaatje's narrative is implicitly and simultaneously interested in the

18 way we understand our contemporary world. It is this relationship between the past and the present - the historical and the contemporary - that connects my analysis of

Ondaatje's novel to the larger issues I wish to explore in this thesis. It is my contention that, in working to challenge the conventions associated with historical narrative,

Ondaatje's text, by extension, also considers more generally the ways in which an altered sense of the past is connected to shifting perceptual modes in the present. Therefore, a close and detailed consideration of how Ondaatje's text challenges conventional notions of historiography will serve as the foundation of my argument as a whole, for it provides the terms through which to address the connection between history and national identity in the present.

At issue here, then, is how Ondaatje's narrative draws attention to alternative modes of knowing the past, rather than conforming to conventional modes of historical representation and articulations of truth. As it both stems from and challenges conventional historical narrative, Coming Through Slaughter can be read as historical counter-narrative - or an example of what Ondaatje refers to as sub-history - that resists narrative cohesion through attention to the role of the historian or biographer in the formation of the text, emphasis on multiplicity, and insistence upon fragmentation.

Ondaatje's text suggests that historical narrative is not an accurate depiction of the past, but, instead, a representation of that past "extrapolatfed] from present circumstances"

(Wyile, Speculative xii) and, thus, always in the process of being articulated and re- articulated.

Biography and Historical Narrative: Webb, Bellocq. and Ondaatje's Narrator

19 An analysis of Ondaatje's text as alternative historical narrative or counter- narrative must consider the way in which this narrative is structured in order to address how it interprets and communicates history. While Coming Through Slaughter can certainly be considered historical fiction, it can also be read, more specifically, as fictional biography in the sense that it deals in particular with a single historical figure: the early and legendary jazz musician Buddy Bolden. Addressing the novel as fictional biography allows for an analysis of the text that draws clear attention to the manner in which the narrative is shaped as well as to the writer or biographer and the role he plays in this historical reconstruction. Where conventional historical narrative emphasizes the objectivity of the historian, historical counter-narrative explores the manner in which the historian or biographer goes about constructing a coherent narrative from various remnants of the past. One of the ways through which this act of reconstructing the past is explored (rather than told) is through an emphasis on the role of the author or biographer in the shaping of historical material. Considering Coming Through Slaughter as biography allows, in turn, for a careful analysis of the autobiographical components of the text, thus encouraging a consideration of the metafictional elements of the narrative as well.

Several biographer figures appear in Ondaatje's text. The most obvious of these is Webb, who spends a great deal of the novel trying to locate the missing Bolden, an activity that in many ways parallels the biographer's task of locating an historical figure in the archives. Webb is comparable to the conventional biographer in the sense that he speaks to Bolden's family, friends, and acquaintances - he sifts through the various traces

20 of Bolden's life - in an effort not only to locate Bolden, but, more significantly, to know him. Through his various interviews, Webb attempts to "[enter] the character of Bolden" in order "to understand not where Buddy was but what he was doing" (Slaughter 60).

Webb seeks both literally and figuratively to locate Bolden. In other words, much like the historian seeking to locate an historical figure in the archive, Webb attempts to locate

Bolden by coming to an understanding of who he is. In his article "Coming Through

Slaughter: Fictional Magnets and Spider's Webbs," Stephen Scobie suggests that "Webb is no ordinary detective" in that "he is after not just facts but a kind of possession or identification" with Bolden (10). Through his efforts to collect information about

Bolden, Webb constructs a cohesive narrative of Bolden's life which he can enter and through which he can come to a definitive understanding of this biographical subject.

In his attempt to gain access to the absent person of Bolden, Webb works to unify the many traces of Bolden which he encounters. Rather than allowing these fragments to speak for themselves, he seeks to insert them into a unified narrative of Bolden's life - an objective that ultimately prevents him from fully identifying his subject. Despite his acknowledgment that "Buddy had lived a different life with every one of them"

(Slaughter 60), Webb seeks to unify the multiplicity of narratives he encounters. Scobie argues that Webb "creates Bolden" and, in this sense, functions as "the ultimate audience... demanding that [Bolden] perform to its liking" (11). Ondaatje's text associates this relationship between Bolden as performer and Webb as audience with a unified narrative that edits and excludes aspects of Bolden's life; Bolden articulates the desire to "find one person who will be the right audience" and accuses Webb of

"cut[ting] me in half, pointing me here. Where I don't want these answers" (Slaughter

21 86). The narrative Webb produces - the performance he demands - is singular rather than multiple and thus "cuts" out of Bolden's life that which does not fit with its narrative line. This approach is more clearly illustrated in another of Webb's investigations - that concerning the murder of Bolden's mother-in-law. In reference to this case, Webb asserts that "I've solved the murder" while at the same time acknowledging that "not everyone agrees with me" (Slaughter 22). As with his acknowledgment that Bolden was

"different with every one of them" (Slaughter 60), Webb recognizes the multiplicity of his subject, but, instead of allowing these multiple perspectives to speak for themselves, he works to construct a narrative that will present his subject as an artificially cohesive whole.

As a product of his insistence upon unifying the various fragments of Bolden's life, Webb fails to locate Bolden in both the ways in which he intends. While Webb does succeed in locating Bolden, he is ultimately unable to fully know or identify with him.

Shortly following his return, Bolden goes mad and is confined to a mental institution where both he and his music become silent. In this silence, Bolden is no longer accessible in the sense that he can no longer speak about his own experiences; these experiences are now only available through second-hand accounts, accounts that Webb continues to refer to, but which inevitably fail him. Webb receives a letter from Bolden's wife, Nora, which tells him that his friend has died and which thus ends his visits to the hospital where Bolden lives. It is not until eight years later, in conversation with Bella

Cornish, that Webb learns that "he's not dead' (Slaughter 152, emphasis in original) and that Nora's letter, a document which Webb relies on to provide him with information about Bolden, has misled him. Webb's conventional biographical strategies - his

22 reference to documents as a means through which to produce a cohesive narrative of the life of his subject - fail him. Webb does not consider alternatives to Nora's letter; he accepts this document and the information it contains at face value and, as a result, is left with a narrative that is partial, inaccurate, and misleading. He is also left physically grappling with the repercussions of his failed narrative; his need to vomit while "knowing that there was nothing to come up at all" (Slaughter 153) parallels his inability to "come up" with a reliable narrative of Bolden's life. In his attempt to employ the strategies of conventional biography or historiography, Webb is a failed biographer - a biographer who, despite his thorough and detailed investigation of Bolden's life, is, in the end, deceived by a seemingly authoritative document simply because he does not consider alternatives.

Despite the fact that the character of Webb is very much located in a conventional historiographic mode, his investigation into the life of Bolden, while certainly favouring a single interpretation, does not cancel out or conceal the alternative elements surrounding the narrative that he constructs. While the various elements of this investigation do not make it into the narrative Webb eventually produces, the reader is nonetheless provided with access to these multiple, often contradictory, elements of Bolden's story by virtue of the fact that Ondaatje's narrative presents Webb's investigation or exploration as well as

Webb's interpretation of that investigation. In other words, the reader is provided with access to the process of Webb's narrative construction and is thus privy to that which is both included and excluded from his narrative. As mentioned above, the reader is informed that "Buddy had lived a different life with every one of them" (Slaughter 60).

Despite the fact that his narrative insists on the authority of his conclusions, Webb's

23 investigation also gestures towards the fact that there are different interpretations of the events or persons he is investigating; Webb, as we have seen, articulates this contradiction between his own singular conclusions and other possible conclusions when he states that "not everyone agrees with me" (Slaughter 22). The other biographer figures in Ondaatje's text explore this multiplicity in more detail.

Bellocq, for example, amplifies Webb's suggestion of multiple interpretations of historical persons and events through his use of photography. Often understood as a medium through which history can be recorded and preserved, Bellocq's photographs instead suggest that historical documents are more interpretive than authoritative. In

"Naming the Present/Naming the Past: Historiographic Metafiction in Findley and

Ondaatje," W.M. Verhoeven argues that "the apparent objectivity and verisimilitude of pictures ultimately turns out to be as untrustworthy as that of historical texts" because

"pictures have to be interpreted" (290). Rather than telling the viewer something definitive about what they depict, photographs generate questions about their own subjectivity - that is, about the context in which they were taken as well as the context in which they are received. After being approached by Webb, Bellocq destroys a photographic negative of Nora, insisting that now there would be "no more questions"

(Slaughter 49). In the act of destroying this negative in order to prevent the questions it may generate, Bellocq demonstrates his belief in the ability of photographs not to answer questions about the past, but, in fact, to encourage these questions. Photographs, therefore, are subjective interpretations of history rather than objective historical documents, and they can thus be associated with an approach to historical interpretation that is concerned with the multiple ways in which documents are created and received.

24 In Ondaatje's text, photographs are thus dissociated from their accepted status as documents relating an unmediated past and are instead considered as a medium that must be interpreted and narrated. Verhoeven draws attention to this interpretation of photographic images "which we are repeatedly made aware of, since we quite frequently do not get to see the pictures themselves" in Ondaatje's text (291). The only photograph that we are able to see is that of Bolden and his band, which appears on the novel's title page. As the only historical document that has survived Bolden, we may expect this image to answer questions about this historical figure, not (like the picture of Nora) to generate questions instead. Ondaatje's narrative describes the picture as "not good or precise," as it "was found after the fire" in Bellocq's studio (Slaughter 63). The quality of the image itself is not the only thing about this photograph that is indefinite.

Historians have noted that some of the members of Bolden's band are holding their instruments incorrectly, a common practical joke among musicians at the time (Martin

46); if this picture were to be taken at face value, one might conclude that Bolden's band did not know how to play the instruments they posed with. This suggests that even direct consideration of the image itself requires a level of interpretation that goes beyond simply assessing the photograph as an unmediated historical document. Bellocq's photographs, both the one present and those described, do not provide answers about the past, but, in the process of interpretation, encourage questions instead.

This process of interpretation also involves attention to the context in which a photo is constructed or framed. In this sense, Bellocq's photographs generate questions not only about the subjects they depict, but also about the photographer himself. The reader is told that, when looking at his work, "you think of Bellocq wanting to enter the

25 photographs, to leave his trace on the bodies" (Slaughter 51). Bellocq's involvement with his subject is unconcealed and his photographs are therefore obviously and necessarily subjective construction, not objective record. Unlike Webb who seeks to discover a cohesive, authoritative narrative of his subject's history, Bellocq creates an intentionally subjective history of his subject - one in which both he (as artist) and the audience (as viewers) are given roles in the determination of the subject's identity. Rather than trying to enter the subject only to access his reality, as Webb does, Bellocq pays careful attention to the manner in which the subject is approached or entered and, like his photographs themselves, interpreted differently by different people. Each viewer, in a sense, enters a photograph, or other historical document, "leav[ing] [his or her] trace on the bodies" depicted there.

Through his photographs and the manner in which they not only generate questions but also draw attention to the role of the photographer in their subjective construction, Bellocq can be read as a postmodern biographer. While the term

"postmodern" can, of course, be understood and contextualized in a variety of ways, in literary theory it often denotes, among other things, a text's attention to its own fabrication as a means of preventing adherence to any singular interpretation of its meaning. In The Canadian Postmodern. Linda Hutcheon defines postmodern literature as that which is "not fixed, closed, eternal, and universal" (19) while also being

"fundamentally self-reflexive" (1). The postmodern biographer, therefore, is not interested in locating a central, unified narrative that will definitively explain or allow the reader to know his or her subject, but instead explores the multiple influences and circumstances that provide the context for the subject's life. In so doing, the postmodern

26 biographer must acknowledge his or her own role in the narrative of the life he or she is constructing. In "Michael Ondaatje and the Problem of History," Ajay Heble argues that

Ondaatje feels "he cannot write about the past without ultimately writing a kind of autobiography" (98). Postmodern biography can be more accurately understood as

(auto)biography, a form that explores (instead of determining) the life of the biographical subject, while also revealing the participation of the biographer in its construction. For the postmodern (auto)biographer, no story can be told without also telling, in some way, the story of the biographer him or herself. In the sense that it draws on more than one story or narrative influence - that of the subject, the biographer, and possibly others, as I will discuss in more detail further on - the postmodern (auto)biography insists upon a multiple, rather than singular, narrative representation of the biographical subject. As

Nancy Bj erring argues in "Deconstructing the 'Desert of Facts': Detection and

Antidetection in Coming Through Slaughter," in Ondaatje's narrative, "no one solution will suffice" (336). The postmodern (auto)biographer must consider all possible interpretations in order to explore a person's life.

The narrator of Ondaatje's novel, like Bellocq, is a postmodern (auto)biographer and thus the third and final biographer figure to appear in Coming Through Slaughter.

Much like Bellocq, this narrator is concerned with presenting the life of Bolden through a narrative that, instead of conforming to the conventions of singular, objective historical narrative, insists upon multiple and fragmented representations of Bolden that are at once both dynamic and metafictional. Rather than looking at Bolden singularly as a jazz musician, Ondaatje's narrator draws attention to Bolden's multiple roles by describing him as "a barber, publisher of The Cricket, a cornet player, good husband and father, and

27 an infamous man about town" (Slaughter 7). In Ondaatje's narrative, Bolden is more than simply a legendary figure of early jazz, and the exploration of his life necessitates attention to all facets of his existence. Like Bellocq's photographs and the questions they generate, Bolden's life is not attributable to any singular interpretation but is instead contingent upon a variety of perspectives and contexts.

Like Bellocq, Ondaatje's narrator concerns himself with the manner in which he shapes his narrative of Bolden's life. He does this by drawing himself into the narrative, which is accomplished, most notably, through an identification between Bolden and the narrator facilitated by photographic representation. We are told that "the photograph moves and becomes a mirror" (Slaughter 134) and thus not only conflates the images of

Bolden and Ondaatje's narrator, but, further, moves the narrator into the historical documents he is using much in the same way that Bellocq moves into his own pictures.

While it may be tempting to address this narrator as Ondaatje himself, I believe that this approach is too simplistic. While Ondaatje's narrator certainly draws metafictive attention to Ondaatje as author, to suggest such an equation is to emphasize authorial intent - an emphasis that works against the text's larger concerns with interpretation and representation. Rather than appearing in his own text and thereby asserting control over that text, Ondaatje's narrator draws attention to the role of the author or historian in the construction of the narrative by suggesting, but not asserting, Ondaatje's presence.

Ondaatje's narrator is drawn into the biography of Bolden's life through an identification which conflates these figures, as a way not of erasing the distinction between them, but of drawing attention to this conflation; this, in turn, reflects upon the similar relationship between Ondaatje and his narrator. By focusing on the process

28 through which the biographer and subject may become indistinguishable, Ondaatje's narrative prevents this conflation from being fully realized. In the case of both Bellocq's photograph and Ondaatje's text, the artist or biographer is present but does not exert singular control over the representative or interpretive process of the photo or narrative.

Instead, this presence suggests the necessity of interpretation - that of the artist or biographer as well as that of the audience. In other words, by associating the author with the text rather than asserting authorial control, Ondaatje's narrative calls for multiple interpretations of the material produced - interpretations in addition to those provided by the author.

The identification between the narrator and Bolden calls to mind the similar identification between Webb and Bolden discussed above. Like Webb who attempts "[to enter] the character of Bolden" (Slaughter 66), Ondaatje's narrator conflates himself with his biographical subject by placing himself in the historical documents that pertain to this subject. However, there is a key difference in the form of identification between Bolden and these two characters. Whereas Webb, by entering his subject, conceals himself within the narrative he creates, Ondaatje's narrator enters the documents pertaining to his historical subject in an effort to reveal his role in the construction of Bolden's biography.

Webb tells us that, prior to Bolden's disappearance, he "went to the city and, unseen, tracked Bolden for several days" (Slaughter 31); in both his observations and his narration of Bolden's life, Webb remains concealed. Ondaatje's narrator, on the other hand, repeatedly draws attention to himself in the narrative he constructs in a manner in keeping with Bellocq's approach to photography. Returning to the example above, rather than simply inserting himself in the photograph, the narrator turns this picture into a

29 mirror which reflects his own image. This does not, however, focus attention on the narrator and his particular interpretation, but draws attention to his interpretation as interpretation and not definitive narrative. In drawing parallels between himself and his subject by, among other things, insisting that "he was the same age as I am now"

(Slaughter 134), the narrator works to reveal (not conceal) his influence and to suggest that other influences are also at work in his narrative.

This attention to his own presence in the text makes Ondaatje's narrator a postmodern (auto)biographer in the sense that the narrative he produces tells the reader as much about himself as it does about the subject he explores. However, it is through more than metafictional techniques alone that Ondaatje's text seeks to provide an alternative historiographic mode. In The Canadian Postmodern. Hutcheon argues that "the meaning of the past is not coherent, continuous, or unified - until we make it so" (16). Indeed, the past comes down to the present through documents that are, at best, fragmented and contradictory. Ondaatje's text embraces the multiplicity of the past and works to communicate a narrative that, rather than presenting a unified interpretation of history, emphasizes the various ways in which the past appears to us in the present. Through its insistence on multiplicity and reliance on fragmentation, Coming Through Slaughter is a text concerned with working against conventional notions of historiographic reconstruction and instead producing a narrative that both emphasizes its own construction and encourages the reader to reconstruct his or her own narrative as well.

Multiple Histories

30 As postmodern historical fiction or, more specifically, postmodern

(auto)biography, Coming Through Slaughter emphasizes the construction inherent in all historical texts. By drawing attention to the interpretive role of the author and narrator, the text implicitly suggests that historical narrative can be interpreted in more than one way. Explicitly, the novel focuses on multiplicity or multiple perceptions and interpretations of historical events as a means through which to resist a unified historical reconstruction. In her study of contemporary Canadian novels entitled Challenging

Canada: Dialogism and Narrative Techniques in Canadian Novels. Gabriele Helms employs the term dialogism to indicate an "interplay of voices, [in which] no single monologic voice is allowed to unify or dominate; not even the narrator's own views can constitute an ultimate authority" (7). Ondaatje's narrative strategy can be understood in these terms; as a narrative that seeks to represent the multiplicity of its historical subject, the postmodern (auto)biography is occupied with presenting a variety of historical interpretations, and thus also with representation that is multiple rather than cohesive. As

I will discuss in more detail further on, this multiplicity can, in turn, be relevant in the national context as well.

At this point, however, I wish to examine the ways in which Ondaatje's narrative emphasizes multiplicity. The text both alludes to the multiple perceptions of Bolden's life by insisting that he "had lived a different life with every one of them" (Slaughter 60) and illustrates this for the reader by providing access not only to various different - often contradictory - interpretations of Bolden's life, but also by emphasizing the manner in which history is perceived differently. Heble argues that "Ondaatje reshapes our experience of history, forcing us to consider from new perspectives the [life] of Buddy

31 Bolden" ("Michael Ondaatje" 101). Ondaatje's narrative forces us to consider Bolden from a variety of perspectives and demands the reader acknowledge the various contradictions these perspectives generate.

One of the ways in which the text draws attention to multiple historical perspectives is by providing nearly simultaneous access to more than one account of the same event. During the scene in which Bolden fights with Tom Pickett, the narrative moves from Bolden's perspective to Pickett's, hereby allowing the reader to enter the minds of both these characters and perceive the events depicted through each one in turn.

This narrative strategy allows the reader to see Bolden from two different perspectives.

We get to hear, for example, that Bolden is perceived by Pickett as "tense, you know"

(Slaughter 69) as well as Bolden's perception of himself as "exhausted... I'm finished

I'm empty" (Slaughter 70). By providing the reader with access to multiple perceptions of Bolden that are not necessarily in agreement, the narrative demands a consideration of the ways in which perceptions differ and, further, how these perceptions - often recorded in historical documents - are reconciled in the creation of historical narrative.

Rather than providing a cohesive narrative of what happened between these two men, this multiple narrative emphasizes contradiction and uncertainty. Despite the fact that we are given access to both, there is no clear communication between the perspective of Bolden and the perspective of Pickett. While Bolden reveals that he is "exhausted," he also "can't tell [Pickett]" and Pickett, therefore, continues the fight between them in order to defend himself against Bolden, whom he still perceives as an aggressor. In addition, neither character can tell us exactly why these events transpired; even Bolden himself asks "what the hell is wrong with me?" (Slaughter 70). This episode does not give the

32 reader a more complete understanding of events by allowing him or her access to the perception of more than one character; instead, this narrative strategy forces the reader to consider contradictory interpretations of a single event, thus emphasizing the artificiality of the cohesive historical narrative while also suggesting that it may not be possible to access the past directly.

As perception differs from person to person, it suggests a complicated understanding of what constitutes our ability to access the reality of the past. Insanity offers a model of how reality is perceived differently, and thus works in the novel to interrogate what we perceive as reality, how this reality can be perceived, and how we decide what is real and what is not. As a different way of perceiving the events that take place around us, insanity suggests a new way of understanding historical interpretation that does not conform to conventional notions of truth. Bj erring suggests that "Buddy blows his mind... in some personally devastating attempt to renounce once and for all... the artist's access to truths of any sort" (336). While this particular reading of Bolden's mental illness may seem a bit bleak, it does suggest that truth or historical reality, far from being something that can be accessed through historical record and communicated through historical narrative, can be arrived at (if at all) only through reference to various interpretations of what reality may have been at some point in the past, a consideration that involves attention both to multiple perceptions and to the various ways in which events are perceived and interpreted. Insanity, therefore, suggests that truth, rather than being singularly accessible, is instead multiple, interpretive, and more about representation than fact.

33 The alternative perspective associated with Bolden's insanity can be explored in more detail in relation to Bellocq's photographs. The narrative establishes a connection between Bolden and Bellocq in terms of alternative forms of perception when it reveals that "[Bellocq] had pushed his imagination into Bolden's brain" and, further, links this association to Bolden's insanity by asserting that "as Bellocq lived at the edge in any case he was at ease there and as Buddy did not he moved on past him like a naive explorer looking for footholds" (Slaughter 61). This association between alternative forms of understanding - described here in terms of imagination - and Bolden's going over the edge into insanity suggests not only that insanity is linked with different ways of seeing, but further that these ways of seeing can be understood in terms similar to Bellocq's photographs. I will therefore return momentarily to Bellocq's use of photography as a subjective art form rather than objective document. When photographing prostitutes,

Bellocq refuses the "offering of grotesque poses" (Slaughter 50) and instead seeks to photograph something far less tangible. We are told that he attempts to

catch her scorning him and then waiting, waiting for minutes so she would

become self-conscious towards him and the camera and her status, embarrassed at

just her naked arms and neck and remembers for the first time in a long while the

roads she imagined she could take as a child. And he photographed that.

(Slaughter 50)

Bellocq's photographs are not merely subjective documents; they are, more particularly here, documents that attempt to capture what cannot be directly observed. Inevitably, however, "the picture is just a figure against a wall" (Slaughter 50), suggesting that, in order to access the representative potential of these photographs, interpretation is

34 essential - interpretation that is open to seeing that which is beyond the directly perceivable. In other words, in order for these photographs to have meaning they must be interpreted. This is true, of course, of both artistic representation and historical document, and it follows therefore that the perception of history (in all its possible contradictions) is integral to its understanding.

Bolden's insanity can be associated with a similar form of altered perception.

Following his confinement to the East Louisiana State Hospital, Bolden's perception of the world undergoes a noticeable change marked and precipitated by his lapse into madness. In his hospital room, Bolden runs strings across the floor as a way of measuring his time there, noting that "when the sun touches the first string wham it is 10 o clock. It is 2 o clock when he touches the second. When the shadow of the first string is under the second string it is 4 o clock. When it reaches the door it will soon be dark"

(Slaughter 142). Through his array of carefully placed strings, Bolden conceives of a new and different way of measuring time; rather than perceiving the passage of time in the usual way connected with clocks and working days, Bolden measures his time in the hospital through the tracking of sunlight on the floor. The narrative provides no indication of whether or not this system provides Bolden with the same information about the passage of time as more conventional methods of time-telling. It does, however, call to mind the way in which time is measured - or perceived. Both Bolden's system and more conventional methods attempt to measure that which cannot be directly perceived; rather than knowing time, we tell time through the use of clocks or the movement of the sun. Time itself is difficult - if not impossible - to access and therefore, in order to know it, we must rely upon its interpretation through various strategies and devices. Thus,

35 Bolden's lapse into madness is associated with alternative modes of perceiving what cannot be directly known.

Bolden's altered perception is further disconnected from recognizable or conventional reality in relation to what he perceives as a "breastless woman in blue pyjamas" (Slaughter 141). These women who come to visit him in his hospital room are later revealed to be, in fact, "guard rapes" (Slaughter 150). If Bolden is capable of making such an obvious error, then all of his accounts can reasonably be questioned, making him an unreliable narrator in the story of his own life. Further, if Bolden is the centre to his own story - that historical figure to which the biographical narrative seeks to gain access - but is himself incapable of telling the story of his own life, the validity or accuracy of all historical documents - documents that, as second-hand accounts, are already less reliable then Bolden himself- are also cast into doubt. The ability of historical narrative or biography to access the truth of Bolden or the reality of his life is hereby complicated and would seem to be in keeping with Bj erring's notion that insanity in the novel casts doubt upon the possibility of gaining "access to truths of any sort"

(336).

However, rather than simply questioning and complicating what constitutes knowable reality and the ability of historical narrative to gain access to truth, the text works to complicate what is understood as true. In my introduction, I argued that historical fiction does not clearly associate truth and reality, but instead suggests that all truth requires some kind of narrative intervention in order to acquire meaning. The truth of Bolden's reality calls attention to this narrative intervention in that it does not correspond to the recognizably real, but is contingent upon his own perception and

36 interpretation. Despite the inaccuracy of Bolden's perception of the hospital guards, the text asserts that he "took rapes from what he thought were ladies in blue pyjamas"

(Slaughter 150, emphasis mine). This suggests that, even though his perception is inaccurate, it is nonetheless real for Bolden and in this sense makes up part of what constitutes the truth of his reality - and it is, after all, Bolden's reality with which the text is concerned. The narrative thus suggests that what appears as truthful to one person may not appear as so to another. Joan Wallach Scott's analysis of experience as evidence is useful here; she asserts that the individual's experience of the past does not provide historical truth, but reveals "the substitution of one interpretation for another" (397). Just as his tracking sunlight on the floor presents itself as an alternative means through which to perceive time, Bolden's perception of reality provides an alternative interpretation of truth. In short, truth itself can vary from person to person because it is itself caught up in multiple perceptions and interpretations.

Fragmented Histories

In addition to destabilizing the notion of a unified, singular historical narrative through an emphasis on multiple interpretations and perceptions of history, Ondaatje also constructs Coming Through Slaughter as a text that is intentionally and necessarily fragmented, hereby challenging the cohesive nature of conventional historical narrative.

In addition to including multiple narratives or perspectives, Ondaatje's text refuses to reconcile these perspectives. Instead, the narrative insists upon fragmentation and thus challenges the clear distinction between what is considered factual and what is considered

37 fictional in order to problematize the standards around which conventional historical texts are constructed. Early in the novel, Ondaatje's narrator explicitly establishes his interest in both factual and fictional accounts of Bolden's life. He tells the reader that "here there is little recorded history" but that "tales... come down to us in fragments" (Slaughter 2).

Further, the narrator contrasts his narrative with that of official history by exploring the

"homes of Bolden, still here today, away from recorded history" (Slaughter 4). Not only does this reveal Ondaatje's narrator's interest in alternative versions of Bolden's life, but it also suggests that, rather than attempting to access history in some direct, unmediated way, he is viewing and constructing his narrative from "today," from the present. Thus, he implicitly reminds us that this narrative must be constructed, fabricated, or fictionalized. Coming Through Slaughter, as a fragmented narrative, is concerned not with providing an unified, accurate account of the past, but with exploring history in its fragmentation as a means through which to challenge the distinction between fact and fiction.

In Ondaatje's text, factual details are presented in fragments whereas fictional accounts are more immediate and complete. As a result, fictional accounts appear more

"real" - that is, more fully connected with the events of the past - than the factual sections of the text. This works to complicate the binary distinction between fact and fiction. As Naomi Jacobs argues in "Michael Ondaatje and the New Fiction

Biographies," "the facts" in Ondaatje's text "feel considerably less certain than fiction"

(9) and, further, "the most purely invented sections are told in the most strongly assertive form" (10). Indeed, whereas facts are often listed, fictional accounts of Bolden's life are narrated for the reader, thus making them feel more immediate and, as a result, more real.

38 In my introduction, I drew on Hay den White's observation that truth is connected with the factual or the real only in their mutual connection to narrativity (Content 6). This connection among fact, truth, and narrative is evident in Ondaatje's text. In one of

Ondaatje's fact sheets we are told that, in April 1907, "Bolden (thirty-one years old) goes mad while playing with Henry Allen's Brass Band" (133). The fictional account of this lapse into madness is, however, much more detailed and provides the reader with an inside view of the events by virtue of its focalization through Bolden himself. In this long section, Bolden relates, for example, that "something's fallen in my body and I can't hear the music as I play it" (Slaughter 130) and that "[I] feel the blood that is real moving up bringing fresh energy" (Slaughter 131, emphasis mine). This fictional account of

Bolden as he lapses into madness, though itself still fragmented, is far more cohesive than the fact sheet that follows. As a result, the fictional account is made more immediate, more real or truthful than the factual; this is certainly in keeping with, as previously discussed, Ondaatje's attention to "the truth of fiction" (Slaughter 163). Despite its fabrication, this fictional account provides the reader with access to Bolden's consciousness in a way that factual accounts simply cannot.

This contrast between factual information and fictional reconstructions of that information complicates the fact / fiction binary, which asserts fact as that which is more real than fiction. In his review of Coming Through Slaughter entitled "The Good Jazz,"

Roy MacSkimming argues that Ondaatje's narrative shift from fictional accounts to factual record makes the reader feel "as if, having tasted a dead man's sweat and blood, we are once again looking at him down the dusty tunnel of history" (94). The fragmented presentation of facts in Ondaatje's text, in contrast to more fully realized fictional

39 sections, complicates the conventional understanding of fact as being more real, or as providing a window to the past of which fiction is not capable. In this sense, the fact / fiction binary is inverted - fact, which is normally considered more true than fiction, is no longer the most real part of the text.

The fact / fiction binary in Coming Through Slaughter, however, is not merely inverted, but also confused. Hutcheon argues that "the relation of fiction to historical fact" in postmodern historical fiction "is made even more complex than any simple binary opposition between fact and fiction can suggest" (Canadian Postmodern 69). This confusion between fact and fiction is most evident in the sections of text dealing with interviews. As historical documents, interviews are generally accepted as capable of providing the historian with access to the facts of history; these accounts are also, however, less commonly realized as deeply interpretive and subjective. Ondaatje's narrator, for example, refers to the interviews conducted by Webb as "stories" (Slaughter

60), which suggests a certain fictionality that is not generally associated with this type of historical document. Later in the text, the reader is presented with a different kind of interview - one less caught up in the fiction of the narrative - but that nonetheless still associates a certain subjective construction with such documents. Coming Through

Slaughter includes a transcript of audio reels containing a number of interviews with

Frank Amacker. These interviews are interesting in that they record the conversation between interviewer and interviewee, while also including references to the music played during the interview. In textual form, it becomes obvious that the transcription is incapable of doing justice to the original audio reels in the sense that it can only tell the reader about, not show, the music played. The text tells the reader that Amacker "plays

40 (almost immediately) old rag with wide arms spread" and that he "plays 'Moonlight on the Ganges'" (Slaughter 154). The textual account of this interview is unable to provide the reader with access to what this playing sounded like - it can only refer to the fact that it occurred. This failure to represent Amacker's music parallels Ondaatje's own inability to capture Bolden's musical sound, the implications of which I will discuss further in my final chapter.

For my purposes here, it is significant that the Amacker interview is caught up in a form of representation that is notably fragmented rather than cohesive. Amacker moves from playing to telling the interviewer "he and Jelly Roll Morton hung around the BIG 25 together" (Slaughter 154). This serves only further to emphasize the way in which this historical document is fragmented or partial, until it is unified in the "Digest Retype" that follows (Slaughter 155, emphasis in original), a retype that, in narrativizing the interview, chooses to exclude some of the information it contains (Slaughter 156). The fragmented nature of the original reels, and the subsequent retype of the information contained in these reels, draws attention to the interpretative and fragmented nature of these interviews. By challenging the notion of historical documents as concerned solely with fact, the Amacker interviews reveal that both fact and fiction are necessarily involved in all narrative representations of the past. The historical documents included as part of the narrative of Bolden's life work to problematize or challenge not only what is fact and what is fiction, but the very distinction between these terms.

This confusion between fact and fiction leads ultimately to the breakdown of this binary and, as a result, the reader is forced to consider the possibility that neither fact nor fiction can clearly access the past, but instead that both are necessary components of

41 historical narrative, or integral to accessing the truth of history. Heble argues that

"Ondaatje is less concerned with presenting Bolden as he really was than he is with giving us Bolden as he could have been" ("Michael Ondaatje" 105, emphasis in original).

In his acknowledgments at the end of the text, Ondaatje, as we have seen, tells the reader that "some facts have been expanded or polished to suit the truth of fiction" (Slaughter

163). In light of the way in which the text works to destabilize the fact / fiction binary - and ultimately cast into doubt the ability of either to provide accurate information about the past - Ondaatje's "truth of fiction" suggests that fiction, as well as fact, has the ability to provide the reader with knowledge about the past. If we cannot gain access to the past through either fact or fiction, then, as Jacobs argues, "imagined fact and verifiable fact carry equal weight" (5) and we are forced to consider the possible truths of both factual and fictional accounts. In this sense, Ondaatje's reference to the truth of fiction gestures towards the possible truths (multiple rather than singular) that various approaches to historical narrative or historical reconstruction can take.

In its dynamic use of fact and fiction in the creation of historical narrative,

Ondaatje's text is not simply historical fiction - that is, fiction created in reference to history - but something else entirely. Bjerring argues that Ondaatje "mingles history with fiction and document with narrative, yet offers no authoritative synthesis of them"

(331). Indeed, in its multiplicity and fragmentation, Ondaatje's narrative strives to tell the story of Bolden's life not simply as a work of fiction or as a factual account, but through a technique that involves both of these narrative components. In "The Motif of the Collector and Implications of Historical Appropriation in Ondaatje's Novels," Jon

Saklofske refers to this as a "dynamic form of history-telling" (79). Like story-telling,

42 "history-telling" requires narrativization or fabrication while also making use of historical fact. Ondaatje tells the story of Bolden's life using neither fact nor fiction alone, but somehow both. In that it incorporates conventional factual material alongside fictional accounts in such a manner as to confuse the distinction between them, Coming Through

Slaughter is a hybrid narrative - a narrative that is both fact and fiction, while, at the same time, distinctly associated with neither.

Filling in the Gaps of Official History - Coming Through Slaughter as "Sub-History"

Having established itself in terms of multiple perceptions and ways of conceiving of the past as well as with fragmentation and reliance on both fact and fiction, Ondaatje's narrative opens itself to the possibility of adding to, supplementing, or amending singular historical narratives. In this sense, it is very much concerned with filling in the gaps of official history - with providing alternatives to dominant historical narratives in both content and form. Coming Through Slaughter is thus interested in exploring rather than knowing history in order to come to a more inclusive understanding of the past, an understanding that does not seek to consolidate information into a unified, cohesive whole, but instead preserves and insists upon the multiplicity, fragmentation, and partiality of that information.

One way in which Ondaatje's text works to fill in the gaps of history is simply by telling the story of Bolden's life. Saklofske argues that "in Coming Through Slaughter,

Ondaatje contaminates and replenishes Buddy Bolden's forgotten history with a self- conscious synthesis of memory and imagination, both of which... shatter the silence of a

43 nearly-forgotten figure" (73). Ondaatje's text explicitly concerns itself with the history of Bolden - with reconstructing a history that would otherwise remain lost. Scott argues, however, that reference to experience alone "precludes critical examination of the workings of the ideological system itself (383); instead, she insists that

experience is at once already an interpretation and something that needs to be

interpreted. What counts as experience is neither self-evident nor straightforward;

it is always contested, always therefore political. (400, emphasis in original)

Ondaatje's narrative both engages in and encourages precisely this complication of interpretation. At more than one point in the text, as Bolden slips into madness, he asks that someone "Help me" (Slaughter 34,40). This simple plea can be read as a request for the active participation, not only of the historian or biographer, but also of the reader in salvaging his story from the recesses of official history - a request to read and reconstruct his story in order to prevent its loss. Ondaatje's text, I would argue, facilitates this process of reconstruction: it provides the reader with various remnants of Bolden's life - remnants that are numerous and often irreconcilable - and thus allows readers to fill in the gaps of Bolden's history in the multiplicity of their own terms.

The ways in which Coming Through Slaughter engages in historical amendment is directly tied to the multiplicity and fragmentation that I have spent the majority of this chapter discussing. Ondaatje's narrative, rather than providing only one alternative to the conventional historical record, seeks to offer the means through which to generate multiple alternatives. Bolden is a suitable subject for this type of historical project precisely because there is not much about him that is known for certain; as a legendary figure who left behind few traces of himself, Bolden is open for interpretation in ways

44 that more conventionally documented historical figures might resist. As he is present in the historical archive in fragmented form, Bolden is a figure who can be known only through interpretation and multiple representation.

Bolden's publication, The Cricket, serves as an example of the way in which multiple, fragmented narratives can fill in the gaps of official history. Ondaatje's text tells us that The Cricket "respected stray facts, manic theories, and well-told lies" and that, as its editor, "Bolden took all the thick facts and dropped them into his pail of sub- history" (18). The Cricket is concerned with constructing an alternative historical record by compiling information. This record is not based solely on the facts of official history, but instead also accepts "manic theories, and well-told lies" - multiple, fragmented, and not necessarily verifiable remnants of the past - alongside these more conventionally recognizable truths. The result is a publication of history that is multiple and which communicates a version of the past that formulates a new understanding of what constitutes historical truth.

It is its classification as "sub-history" that prompts me to consider The Cricket in relation to the narrative in which it is embedded. As sw^-history, this publication is positioned outside the confines of official history; it is in this external space that it is able to move beyond the preoccupations of traditional historiography. The Cricket includes both the fictional and the factual, fully aware of the perception of this content as contradictory. But, rather than focusing on factual accuracy, it works to challenge the power of conventional history which is exercised through the verifiability of fact.

Saklofske argues that by basing "his central figure on an actual person who has nearly slipped through the cracks of official history into obscurity," Ondaafje is "enacting a

45 subversive protest against the typical, against social tradition and cultural history" (75).

Ondaatje's narrative, much like The Cricket, is enacting such a protest by challenging the typical definition of history and the way in which history comes to have meaning in the present and can thus be read as counter-narrative. Even in its attention to The Cricket and Bolden's involvement with this publication, the narrative blurs the distinction between fiction and verifiable fact, for, as historian Donald Marquis reveals in his book

In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz, "no copies have ever been found of The

Cricket" and "it seems reasonably certain, then, that the publisher-barber portion of the

Bolden legend can be put to rest" (7). So, like The Cricket, Ondaatje's narrative deals with theories and lies in equal measure to verifiable facts and can thus likewise be classified and understood as sub-history.

As sub-history, Ondaatje's narrative insists upon the multiplicity and the fragmentation of a single historical narrative while also, by extension, of various historical narratives in relation to one another. In this not necessarily reconcilable multiplicity of historical interpretation, the power of conventional narrative is diffused by allowing various narratives to hold similar interpretive power. As history serves to inform how we understand ourselves in our contemporary world, this reformulation of historical understanding has implications both for how history is considered and also for how we understand ourselves more generally. In this sense, Ondaatje's narrative is not only a reconstruction of the past; it is also a suggestion about how we can come to alternative understandings of the world in which we live. If, as I have argued, history can be understood as one of the tools through which nation and national unity are defined, it can also be linked to the power structures that determine nationhood. Thus, by

46 undermining the interpretive power of history or historical narrative, sub-history also works to reformulate the power dynamics of the nation state.

The subversive power of sub-history is directly connected to both what histories are told and how these histories are narrated. The former I will explore in detail as the argument of this thesis progresses. Here, I am most concerned with the form of historical narrative and its connection to notions of national identity. Helms ties her concept of dialogism to issues of nationhood by arguing that "multiple voices... in contemporary

Canadian novels... challenge constructions of Canada" (7). For Helms, then, it is the very multiplicity that I have been describing here that influences our national self- conception. In his essay "New Contexts of Canadian Criticism: Democracy,

Counterpoint, Responsibility," Heble discusses the practice of counterpoint in similar terms by applying it to what he refers to as "cultural listening." For Heble, counterpoint, or the "predilection for having people... speak 'simultaneously,'" is a "de-hierarchization process that... [is] akin to the process of cultural listening" which is "predicated on our ability to recognize and understand the role that multiple voices... have played in the construction of Canada" ("New Contexts" 85-6, emphasis in original). Like Helms,

Heble is interested in the ways in which multiplicity and fragmentation (in cultural products such as novels and radio programs) have the potential to influence our understanding of ourselves - in terms of both the past and the present. Thus, historical counter-narrative or sub-history has to do with more than just an altered understanding of history; by necessary extension, it is also caught up in national self-definition.

Ondaatje's work has, however, been criticized for its particular approach to history. Arun Mukherjee, for example, has argued that in Ondaatje's work, "art becomes

47 truly self-reflexive. Poems are made about the act of writing poems. Or about other artists in the act of creation. Time and place, real lives of men and women, countries and cultures are irrelevant here" (118). This comment can be read as critical of Ondaatje's failure to engage with the culturally specific, or the political. Mukherjee further accuses

Ondaatje of universalism, arguing that this "is a shorthand for a person who does not want to come to terms with multiplicity and diversity or cultural modes as well as differences of race and class" (119). I agree with Mukherjee that Ondaatje's novel resists

"com[ing] to terms with multiplicity," but I do not see this as a failing of his text.

Instead, refusing to reconcile the multiple is the explicit purpose of sub-history and allows sub-history to emerge as a space in which "diversity and cultural modes" can be explored. It is important that I state this here, in my first chapter, for the remainder of my argument is contingent upon an understanding of history and nation that does not provide answers to questions concerning the plural and the diverse, but instead works to open the space in which these questions can be explored. The potential of this approach lies in its refusal to allow any one narrative to gain permanent authority over others; in other words, it prevents any new master-narratives from taking hold.

In National Dreams: Myth. Memory, and Canadian History. Daniel Francis argues that "the master narrative has been challenged by counter narratives with their own, very different reading of the past, one which is far less flattering to elites" (12). While, unlike

Francis, I am not dealing with particularly Canadian historical moments, this comment can certainly be applied to my argument regarding history and counter-narrative.

Coming Through Slaughter challenges the underlying master-narratives of Canadian nationalism on three fronts. First, as I have been discussing here, it challenges the

48 conventional ways in which history is told and the past can be understood. Second (and relating to the first), as it dissociates itself from the singularity and definitiveness of conventional historical narrative, it opens the space in which alternative narratives of nation can be explored. Finally, by both challenging historical conventions and, importantly, thematizing historical material that is explicitly non-Canadian, it questions what can be considered Canadian and, more particularly, what Canadian plurality or multiculturalism may actually entail. In the following chapters, I will explore the connection and disconnection between history and nation suggested by Ondaatje's narrative in more detail and begin to examine the ways in which, as sub-history,

Canadian novels that deal with the history of elsewhere provide alternatives to master- narratives of nation, in reference to that which is both inside and outside our national borders.

49 CHAPTER TWO

"A Tale That Defied Genre":

History and Nation in Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey

In deference to the mood of the country and the threat from without Peerbhoy Paanwalla

had mobilized his talents for the common good, using his skills to weave a tale that

defied genre or description. (Journey 306)

Like Coming Through Slaughter, Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey is an historical narrative that presents the reader with an interpretation of history that, rather than canceling out other interpretations by insisting upon its own interpretative power, encourages an understanding of the past that is unconventionally plural. In Mistry's text, this notion of historiography as interpretative and representative is explored in connection with cultural diversity and it is in this capacity that it can be understood in terms of the national as well as the historical. Over the course of the novel, Mistry's protagonist,

Gustad, comes to realize that, while both family and nation are formed in relation to the past, they are not tied to, or confined by, that which has come before. Instead, reconsideration of the manner in which history comes to have meaning in the present - either in terms of the personal or the political - influences various forms of human interaction.

Not only is Such a Long Journey identifiable as historical fiction, but it has also been classified as a realist narrative. Hilary Mantel insists, for example, that Mistry is

50 "an author who [can] carry a mirror for us down the dusty highways of India, through the jostling Bombay streets, behind compound walls and into huts and houses" (181) and thus insists upon a direct connection between Mistry's narrative and the world to which it refers. In this correlation between narrative and the real world, realism can be read in terms similar to that which define conventional historical narrative. However, comparable to the way in which Ondaatje's narrative challenges the distinction between the historical and the fictional by pointing to the degree of invention necessary to both,

Mistry's narrative defies the terms of conventional realism by drawing on postmodern literary techniques within the confines of an otherwise realist narrative; by drawing on magic realism, for example, Mistry's narrative incorporates the postmodern into the realist and thus problematizes the clear and unquestioned distinction between these narrative modes. It is my contention that Mistry's text, while undeniably realist, makes use of postmodern elements to challenge the terms through which realism is understood, and consequently raises implicit questions about the values and objectives associated with any given generic mode.

In that it challenges the conventions of both historical narrative and realism,

Mistry's text encourages the reader to question what constitutes knowable reality - of both the past and the present - as a way of undermining the authority of singular historical interpretations. As I have already argued, history serves as the foundation of the nation and is that to which national unity refers, allowing a reformulation of how history can be known also to influence political reality. In its examination of the overlap between the realistic and the postmodern, Such a Long Journey suggests a conflation of

51 the personal and the political that provides the grounds on which to consider the connection between the historical and the national.

Realism and Historical Narrative

Mistry's text is realist in the sense that it makes reference to the real; while the main plotline of the novel (that concerning Gustad Noble and his family) does not depict actual events, it does present fictional events as they could have happened in the real world. In its attention to the possible or the plausible over the actual, Such a Long

Journey can be compared to Ondaatje's narrative which, as Ajay Heble emphasizes, "is concerned with presenting Bolden... as he could have been" ("Michael Ondaatje" 105).

This draws attention to a point of similarity between historical fiction and realism - that is, both historical and realist narratives seek to provide seemingly unmediated access to the world outside themselves, be this in terms of the facts of the real world or the nature of human interaction. Linda Hutcheon points to this parallel when she asserts that

"history (like realist fiction) is made by its writer, even if events are made to seem to speak for themselves" (Canadian Postmodern 66). Both conventional historical narrative and realism present themselves as depicting - rather than interpreting - the real world and thus as being unquestionably accurate, either in terms of historical fact or in terms of human relationships.

Perhaps a more detailed way of looking at this similarity is in connection with

Hayden White's reference to the plausible; he argues that "the consistent elaboration of a number of equally comprehensive and plausible, yet apparently mutually exclusive,

52 conceptions of the same set of [historical] events... undermine [s]... history's claim to

'objectivity'... and 'realism'" (Metahistorv 41, emphasis). White's indication here of the multiplicity of plausible historical narratives as that which undermines the singularity of conventional historical narrative can be understood in relation to realism as well. While not strictly concerned with actual events, realism is nonetheless occupied with presenting a plausible or possible depiction of the real world. In other words, when reading a realist narrative, the reader expects to experience a fictional world that is possible, in the sense that its plotline is believable. However, as Mistry's text is associated with both realism and history, this plausibility can be transferred to the narrative in two ways - first, in its accurate representation of family life, and, second, in its accurate depiction of Indian political history. In both cases, Mistry's narrative is not verifiable but possible, and thus associated, much as Coming Through Slaughter, with both the fictional and the factual.

But these two texts also differ in one key respect; while Ondaatje's text takes an historical figure as the central component of the narrative, Mistry's text relegates the historical to the margins of the story. Jimmy Bilimoria is an useful character through which to explore how the novel chooses to represent the historical material against which its plot is constructed. As Arun Mukherjee outlines in her review of Mistry's novel, the character of Bilimoria is based on a man known as Mr. Nagarwala who is arrested after being accused of impersonating the voice of Mrs. Gandhi in order to obtain a large sum of money from the State Bank of India (145). Like Bilimoria, Mr. Nagarwala died in prison under suspicious circumstances (Mukherjee 146). This obvious parallel between real historical events and the events of Mistry's narrative leave no room for doubt that

Mistry's story is meant to represent this particular historical event. However, rather than

53 using the proper name of this historical figure, Mistry chooses to change his name to

Bilimoria and to construct for him a personal life that is plausible, if not historically verifiable. In this regard, like Ondaatje's text, Mistry's narrative is caught between the factual and the fictional without being entirely reliant on either. Just as Ondaatje's narrative fills in the gaps of official history by narrating Bolden's life, Mistry's narrative, in Mukherjee's words, "attempts to makes sense of actual historical events by narrativizing them, by extending them beyond the curtain of silence in which the official discourses have tried to enshroud them" (145). Mistry's narrative differs from

Ondaatje's, however, in that historical events are considered within a realist framework.

Like historical narrative, realism, as a literary form, is also situated between the factual and fictional in the sense that it seeks to represent the real but is inherently a fictional form. Attention to Mistry's work as realist historical narrative inversely draws attention to the complicated relationship between realism and the so-called real world and thus highlights, rather than conceals, the text's interpretation or construction of that world.

The mediated nature of textual representation in terms of realist narrative is explored in Mistry's text through a consideration of newspaper accounts. Despite the fact that Bilimoria insists that "everything you read in the papers these days... is true"

("Journey 91), Mistry's protagonist, Gustad, consistently finds himself questioning who and what he can trust to tell him the truth about things that are happening beyond his scope of direct experience. He cautions that "whatever you read in the paper, first divide by two.... For what's left, take off another ten percent.... And sometimes, depending on the journalist, another five percent.... Then, only then, will you get the truth" (Journey

68). Gustad, then, while acknowledging that truth exists, questions whether or not that

54 truth can ever be directly accessed; instead, truth must be deciphered through the various ways in which it is represented. Even Mistry's text itself, by including both Bilimoria's and Gustad's divergent views on the accuracy of journalism, refuses to create a clear distinction between the verifiability and fallibility of narrative or its ability to access any sort of truth about the world it represents. This formulation presents a complex understanding of the ability of narrative to access reality that moves beyond any claim to accurate representation issued by conventional realism or historical narrative.

Like realism, journalism presents itself as a narrative form invested in relating the world as it really is. In his article "Cyberwriting and the Borders of Identity: 'What's in a

Name' in Kroetsch's The Puppeteer and Mistry's Such a Long Journey," David Williams argues that "Mistry's inclusion of pseudo-documents and digests from newspapers... delegitimates the 'realism' of journalism itself (68). As journalism and literary realism are both ideologically tied to notions of the real and the ability of narrative to access the real (whether this real be understood in terms of factual correspondence or human interaction), these narrative forms are linked, thus allowing comments on the former to reflect also on the latter. In other words, by commenting on the accuracy of newspaper accounts, the text points to its own narrative construction and mediated interpretation of reality. Mistry's narrative hereby draws attention to its use of realism and questions the ability of realist narrative to represent an unmediated reality.

It is my assertion, therefore, that, even though they can be placed in very different generic categories, Mistry's and Ondaatje's texts can be read as having similar objectives.

That is, both narratives seek to explore the terms through which the real world can be known - and inevitably suggest that this world can only be accessed through mediated

55 forms that represent and interpret rather than reveal. Thus, Mistry's narrative may be realist in genre, but is, at least partially, postmodern in effect. In "Can Rohinton Mistry's

Realism Rescue the Novel?" Laura Moss argues that "realism has 'accepted conventions' to which... the magic realist can react" (159). Moss suggests that magic realism (or, I would argue, postmodernism more generally) has been understood as a more politically active form, and questions this distinction. While I will explore the political implications of Moss's claim in more detail shortly, here I want to draw attention to the conventional opposition between realism and postmodernism - an opposition that suggests a binary relationship between these generic modes and, further, between Mistry's and Ondaatje's texts. However, if, as I have argued above, Mistry's text challenges its own conventions, its particular use of realism cannot be read in conventional terms. Consequently, I will continue my argument by addressing the components of Mistry's text that do not strictly adhere to the realist from, but can be understood as postmodern in origin. While Mistry's text is certainly realist, the way in which it uses realism defies and redefines the terms of the genre.

Mistry's narrative, for example, employs a subtle form of magic realism that challenges the plausibility of realist narrative discussed above. While not asserting the fantastical as strongly as more overtly magic realist texts, the inclusion of magical or ritualistic elements in the text problematizes its representation of reality. These elements are unbelievable or, at least, implausible, but are nonetheless presented as possible. The novel is infused with instances of the magical and the religious that are never directly discounted as agents of change in the story. Both Dilnavaz and Gustad look to means outside the rational - and outside their own religious or mystical beliefs - to try to

56 influence their son Sohrab in his career decisions. On the advice of her neighbour Miss

Kutpitia, Dilnavaz begins to practice magic in order to influence the mind of her son.

While at first Dilnavaz is skeptical about the usefulness or practicality of magic, she later comes to believe in its effects so strongly that she is concerned about using this magic, lest it cause harm. When Miss Kutpitia suggests she use magic to transfer her son's problems to Tehmul, a resident of her building who, due to a childhood accident, has been left mentally and physically disabled, she "[shrinks] from the idea," thinking that "it seemed utterly callous" (Journey 109). She would not be as concerned about Tehmul's welfare here if she had not been convinced of the ability of ritualistic magic to have real- world effect.

While Gustad engages in various forms of ritual throughout the novel, it is in his experience with Catholic ritual in particular that he also attempts to alter his son's ambition. Dilnavaz compares this to her own dealings with magic ritual when she reflects that "Gustad and she desired the same destination, only their paths were different" (Journey 235). At the invitation of a childhood friend, Gustad visits a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary at which various miracles are said to have occurred. He purchases a candle for Dinshawji, his dying friend; he also purchases a candle in the

shape of a man's head to burn in prayer for his son Sohrab, as he is told that "Mother

Mary" can help "with the head" or with "someone not thinking straight" (Journey 227).

Despite the hopefulness of this ritualistic experience, Gustad returns home to find that his friend has died, which prompts him sadly to conclude that "there is no miracle for

Dinshawji" (Journey 235). Gustad appears to have been let down by this ritual and to

lose faith in the ability of such rituals to enact change in the real or rational world.

57 Unlike Dilnavaz whose belief in the rituals she performs strengthen as the narrative unfolds, Gustad is not convinced of the practical effect of ritual - or, at least, of ritual that is not associated with his own religious beliefs.

Despite Dilnavaz's assertion that magic "simplifies and explains" (Journey 63), the text's interpretation of magical, mystical, or religious ritual is anything but simple.

While both Dilnavaz and Gustad engage in ritual to influence the mind of their son, only

Dilnavaz seems to retain some belief in the usefulness of such rituals. Further, the narrative itself refuses to demonstrate or disprove clearly the effectiveness of ritual, magical or religious. At the end of the novel, Sohrab and Gustad are reunited, an event that coincides with the death of Tehmul. Although the narrative does not explicitly insist that there is a correlation between this reunion and Tehmul's death, the juxtaposition of these events suggests that the magic ritual Dilnavaz performs - which is meant to transfer

Sohrab's difficulty onto Tehmul and which she is warned by Miss Kutpitia might be harmful or dangerous to Tehmul - may have had an effect on these real events of the novel. By association, we can also not discount the ritual performed by Gustad as contributing to this reconciliation. In Mistry's narrative, we cannot be sure that ritual has impacted the events of the novel, but we also cannot be sure that it has not.

As it does not discredit the possible, practical effects of magical or religious ritual, Such a Long Journey is a story that does not strictly adhere to the knowable, recognizable versions of reality associated with literary realism. In its efforts to represent the inexplicable as plausible or possible, Mistry's text diverges from - but does not wholly dismiss - the accepted conventions of realism to explore alternative ways of knowing and accessing the real world. In an interview with Geoff Hancock, Mistry

58 argues that "every time one brings words together to make a sentence, one is experimenting" (148); by arguing that writing itself is experimental, Mistry dismisses

Hancock's generic concerns, preferring instead to focus on the act of writing as representational. In its incorporation of non-realist elements, Such a Long Journey, rather than working to uphold the binary oppositions that structure conventional understandings of realism and realist narratives, works to trouble the boundary between the realist and the postmodern and thus, like Mistry, problematizes generic considerations.

Mistry's text cannot, however, be discussed solely in reference to these particular narrative modes. It is not only positioned between realism and postmodernism, but also between history and fiction. Such a Long Journey therefore straddles the generic conventions of various narrative modes, refusing to demonstrate clearly its connection to any one in particular. Its defiance of simple generic categorization challenges the modes through which we make sense of the real. I do not mean to argue that Mistry's novel is or is not realist, magic realist, or postmodern - or historical or fictional - but rather, in that it is purely none of these, it is also all of them. As such, Mistry's narrative challenges any clear distinction between realist and postmodern or historical and fictional narrative.

Instead, it is a narrative that draws on various elements as a way of producing a text that defies simple classification.

The narrative description of Peerbhoy Paanwalla's storytelling reflects the generic ambivalence of the text in which it is embedded. We are told that

Peerbhoy Paanwalla... us[ed] his skills to weave a tale that defied genre or

description. It was not tragedy, comedy or history; not pastoral, tragical-comical,

59 historical-pastoral, or tragic-historical. Nor was it epic or mock-heroic. It was

not a ballad or an ode, masque or anti-masque, fable or elegy, parody or threnody.

(Journey 306)

His story, then, exists in a space between genres, in that, while "careful analysis may have revealed that it possessed a smattering of all these characteristics" (Journey 306), it refuses to ally itself with just one. Nor does his tale submit to any simple hybridization of two different types of narrative. Instead, it is a tale that exists between various narrative modes. Like Peerbhoy's tale, Mistry's narrative is not easily placed in one generic category.

In her consideration of subjectivity and positioning, critic Sherene Razack looks to how "stories are told and how they are heardf (18, emphasis mine). While I will take up its implications in my final chapter, Razack's practical attention to story or narrative reception is my focus here. Peerbhoy Paanwalla's storytelling technique is reflective of this attention in that it suggests a means of listening or reading through which the potential of the text's narrative strategy can be realized. We are told that Peerbhoy's audience responds to his story "in the only way that made sense: with every fibre of their beings" (Journey 306). This manner of listening - or reading - suggests a consideration of narrative that does not adhere to simply one way of understanding the real, but instead looks to the variety of ways in which the real is narrativized. In order to make sense of the story, Peerbhoy's listeners must respond in a likewise multitudinous manner; they must respond to the many layers of story with as many layers of themselves - or "their whole being." Given such a complex narrative, Peerbhoy's listeners do not have the luxury of settling on just one interpretative strategy, but must make sense of the story by

60 drawing on more than one such strategy. In this sense, blurring the boundaries between literary genres is not merely a practice in experimental form; by challenging the boundaries between realism and postmodernism, history and fiction, Mistry's narrative challenges the manner in which we come to understand the real through narrative as well as the ability of any one narrative form fully to access the real. Mistry's text, then, plays with genre in order to problematize singular interpretations of reality that can be become naturalized through attention to only one narrative form, and realism in particular.

Like Peerbhoy Paanwalla's listeners, Mistry's readers must approach the text with attention to the multiple ways in which it can be interpreted. Thus, the text is no longer tied to one interpretative strategy - that associated with realism or conventional historical narrative - but encourages others as well. As a narrative situated between various literary modes of representation, Mistry's text encourages each reader to approach and interpret the text as he or she chooses; it therefore supports a reading that, like that of Peerbhoy's tale, is multiple.

This emphasis on multiple interpretative strategies draws attention to the difficulty of representation. Take, for example, the wall that separates the residents of the

Khodadad Building from the larger city of Bombay. By "using assorted religions and their gods, saints and prophets," the pavement artist who paints this wall feels he is

"doing something to promote tolerance and understanding in the world" (Journey 182).

However, in his attempt to represent various religions, he creates both harmony and conflict. Gustad's neighbour, Rabadi, insists that the artist include a portrait of

"Dustoorji Baria, [who is a] Very Holy Man for Parsis" (Journey 288); however, when

Inspector Bamji sees this image on the wall, he asserts that "that fellow is a charlatan and

61 a disgrace to the Parsi priesthood" (Journey 289). This incident makes clear the difficulty of representation, even within a given religious or cultural group - a difficulty that stems from the possibility of multiple interpretations.

The wall itself also draws attention to representation and, by extension, how attention to representation suggests the difficulty of ever fully accessing the real. The artist who covers this wall with various drawings of religious symbols argues that the wall is itself "a sacred place" and thus "rightfully deserves to be painted on a wall of holy men and holy places." As a result, "the wall featur[es] a painting of the wall featuring a painting of the wall featuring a..." (Journey 288). This image does not simply depict something that exists in the real world; rather, it represents something that is itself representational. True, the wall is a place in the real world of the novel, but its key function is to serve as a medium of religious representation. As religious images themselves stand in for concepts, ideas, and beliefs that do not necessarily have referents in the physical world, the wall can be understood as representational and, therefore, the image of the wall on the wall further complicates the representational project of the wall itself.

The image of the wall on the wall draws attention to the subjective nature of representation and works to unsettle the conventional classification of realism as having the ability to access human reality. Williams argues that this "self-reflexive picture displays a figure founded only on itself, a sign which is wholly arbitrary" (67). The picture of the wall on the wall, rather than being connected to some sort of recognizable reality, instead represents the representational. Though certainly part of the reality of the novel, the wall does not persist in that reality - in the end, the wall itself comes down and

62 direct access to its reality is no longer possible. This situation is, of course, heightened by the knowledge of the fact that we are reading a text that, at this point at least, is not attempting to refer literally to the world outside the novel and that, therefore, the wall does not actually exist at all in the so-called real world. The picture of the wall on the wall draws attention to the inability of any form of narrative - visual or textual - to access and relate the real. I will return to the example of the wall later on in this chapter; suffice it to say here that the wall is the point in Mistry's text against which various interpretations of reality are explored.. Whatever its potential or shortcomings, its very presence in the text suggests that representation and interpretation - of the wall, of

Peerbhoy's tale, of Mistry's text - are not simple or singular activities, but instead multiple and contradictory.

This consideration of representation facilitated through the text's unique generic positioning is that which suggests a level of political comment not generally associated with realism. Moss contests the assertion that "realism is almost necessarily conservative, and non-realist forms are inherently somehow more postcolonial - and therefore subversive" (158) by arguing instead that "realism is a viable, perhaps indispensable, form for political and social engagement" (159). While Moss works to challenge the political terms through which the realist / non-realist binary is constructed, she does not challenge this binary itself. In terms of Such a Long Journey, at least, the power of narrative does not come from either its association with or dissociation from any one categorical distinction; instead, it is its mixing of such categories that allows it to draw on various modes of representation while simultaneously gesturing towards the pitfalls of these modes. Refusing to connect itself fully to any one form of

63 representation, Mistry's narrative is free to explore the multiple ways in which the world is represented and is, in this sense, deeply political.

Realist and historical narrative can therefore be understood in similar terms - that is, both Mistry's particular use of realist narrative and Ondaatje's reformulation of historical narrative exist in a space between generic classification and draw representational and interpretative power precisely from this positioning. Realism can indeed be politically active, as Moss suggests, particularly in the degree to which it transcends the boundaries of realism, much as the potential of Ondaatje's narrative lies in its negotiation between the fictional and the historical rather than in either alone. In this sense, Mistry's text can also be understood as counter-narrative, the terms of which I will explore in more detail shortly.

The Personal and the Political: The Personal is Political

If Peerbhoy Paanwalla's storytelling is reflective of Mistry's larger narrative, then it is also relevant to note the motivations for his tale. The quotation that opens this chapter states that "in deference to the mood of the country and the threat from without

Peerbhoy Paanwalla had mobilized his talents for the common good" (Journey 306). My focus here is on the construction and telling of this tale in particular relation to "the mood of the country" and "the common good." In that it responds to the national context, the way in which this tale is interpreted by Peerbhoy's listeners can also be understood in relation to issues of the nation state - or, more specifically, how the citizens of the country respond to the national situation in which they find themselves. As we are never

64 actually given access to this story, we can understand it in relation only to how its listeners respond. Peerbhoy's tale emphasizes reader (or audience) response and interpretation in association with larger issues of nationhood.

At the end of the previous section I suggested that, in its resistance to singular generic classification, Mistry's text can be understood as a politically active counter- narrative, but I have not yet addressed how this political influence is explored in the text.

While the text does make reference to the political history it is constructed against, the narrative focus is on the plotline involving the Noble family. This plotline is both fictional, as discussed above, and, more to the point here, personal. The text is therefore invested in both the political and the personal, but, again, is not interested in defining the distinction between these categories. It is my contention that a consideration of the parallels between the personal and the political in Mistry's text will reveal the ways in which the narrative functions as a counter-narrative of nation that works to provide alternatives to dominant formulations of community and human interaction.

The character of Bilimoria provides the terms through which to consider the personal in relation to the political. Just as his historical basis alongside his

fictionalization prevents his clear association with either side of this binary, his role in the plot of the novel also refuses to define him as a distinctly personal or political character.

His relationship to the Noble family deeply entrenches him in the personal and familial;

at the same time, however, he is intricately involved in the political plotline that underlies the story as a whole. Gustad refers to his children's perception of Bilimoria as "their

Major Uncle the legendary hero" (Journey 13). This label reveals Bilimoria's familial

associations - his familiar status as uncle to the Noble children - in direct association

65 with his state involvement - specifically, his title of Major and his status as "legendary hero." He is thus a part of the personal lives of the characters as well as of the political reality surrounding these characters and, as such, is in a position to challenge not only, as previously discussed, the distinction between the fictional and the factual, but also that between the personal and the political.

While various critics have addressed the manner in which Such a Long Journey deals with the connection between the personal and the political, few have gone as far as to suggest, as David Townsend does in his short review of Mistry's text, that "the story's private dimensions are not merely weighed against political circumstances; they are revealed as the personal manifestations of the same reality" (62). Anna Lidstone, in her article "Scaling the Walls of Narrative Voice in Such a Long Journey." looks specifically at how Mistry uses third- and first-person narration to suggest a conflation of the personal and the political. She argues that

the first-person voice is used to refer to the same character as the third-person

pronouns. The effect is quite startling. It seems that he is using narrative voice...

to challenge the dichotomy of... political and personal - a type of linguistic

equivalent to the ebb and flow of action which takes place within and outside the

walls in the novel. (62)

What Townsend's and Lidstone's analyses have in common is a focus on how the personal and the political, rather than representing intersecting or influencing realities, can instead be understood as reflective of one another. Both the personal and the political stem from a single reality - and, since that reality cannot be directly accessed, it is only the way in which it is utilized that differs between them.

66 Bilimoria is an example of the way in which the text looks at the relationship between the personal and the political by addressing them as interpretations or representations of the same reality. As the example of the wall discussed above illustrates, all narrative representations are interpretive because they cannot directly access the real; it follows therefore that the personal and the political can be two different ways of accessing the same set of real or historical events. As he is intimately involved in both the personal and political plotlines of the story, Bilimoria bridges the perceived gap between the personal and the political and collapses the distinction between these two seemingly distinct lines of narrative. In so doing, he challenges the ability of both the historical and the political to accurately represent the real and thus suggests that the fictional and the factual, the personal and the political, rather than merely intersecting or overlapping, are drawn instead from the same reality.

Through Bilimoria, the narrative reveals that the personal is political and thus allows for the possibility of reading the personal components of the novel as political as well. If the personal is read as political, then considerations of the family can also be read in terms of the nation; therefore, the various relationships explored in Mistry's text reveal something not only about human interaction, but also about the connection between human interaction and larger social, cultural, and political issues. Mukherjee structures her assessment of Mistry's novel around a resistance to what she refers to as

"the Western, individual-centred... novel" and the consideration of "a narrative form able to place the individual within the collective" (144-5). Mukherjee's consideration of the connection between the individual and the collective is reflective of my assertions here regarding the personal and the political. In its redefinition of conventional familial ties,

67 Mistry's novel suggests alternative forms of human interaction which, over the course of the novel, allow Gustad to come to an understanding of community that replaces the centrality of his own conception of family. Thus, the various relationships depicted and explored in Mistry's novel support a notion of family that is founded on more than just continuation with the past and biological connection. In Such a Long Journey, representations of family and familial bonds can be understood in relation to the social and cultural as well. This formulation of family is shifting and unstable, thus working to challenge any simple practice of inclusion or exclusion in terms that can also refer to the contemporary multicultural state.

Gustad's definition of family roles and the limits of familial association are directly and, for most of the novel, inextricably linked to his childhood experiences of family. In some cases, he seeks to copy the family structure of his youth, but, in other cases, he insists upon a construction of family in direct reaction to this model. In either case, Gustad's notion of family is solidly rooted in his past; consequently, any alteration or amendment to his current familial associations is formulated in reference to this past.

Despite the fact that the family of his childhood, much like his present family, was shifting and changing over the course of his youth, Gustad chooses to fix his notion of family in relation to his perception of these experiences and to attempt to transport this fixed notion into the present.

His preparation of Roshan's birthday feast demonstrates how Gustad's understanding of family is constructed in direct and fixed relation to his past. The night before deciding to bring "a live chicken in the house" to slaughter for the birthday meal

(Journey 18), Gustad "dream[s] of his childhood" and that "live chickens had been

68 brought home from the market by his father, and fattened for two days before the feast"

(Journey 19). As dreaming is itself a mediated and possibly distorted way of accessing the past, that Gustad reacts to this dream as if it were a direct and accurate recounting demonstrates the degree to which he is unaware of how his personal past can be distorted and biased in its very recollection. Following in what he perceives to be his father's footsteps, Gustad also purchases and fattens a live chicken. However, this emulation of his father's familial role does not have the anticipated effect. Rather than enjoying her birthday feast, Roshan is unable to eat the chicken to whom she had become emotionally attached prior to its slaughter. While "Gustad realize[s] how seriously he [has] erred" by bringing a live chicken into his home (Journey 45), he does not comprehend the more serious error that underlies this mistake. In attempting to emulate the family celebrations of his youth, Gustad fails to consider both the context of his current family situation and the degree to which his own memories of the past may be distorted.

This failed continuation of the past into the present is also evident in relation to the furniture constructed by Gustad's father. Having brought this furniture with him from his childhood home, Gustad has been careful to ensure that it has remained "in perfect condition" (Journey 224). Despite the fixed and static nature of this furniture itself,

Gustad is unable to recreate the context in which this furniture was created. In "Rohinton

Mistry's Such a Long Journey: Some First Impressions," Ragini Ramachandra observes that "the image of the book-case recurs so often... that it almost becomes a metaphor for

Gustad's unfulfilled ambition in life" (28). This ambition remains unfulfilled due to

Gustad's insistence upon defining the present in terms of the past. Throughout the text,

Gustad speaks of the bookcase which he will build with Sohrab, asserting that "a small

69 bookcase of the right books" is "all a family really needs" (Journey 103); however, with his dissociation from Sohrab, he fails to realize the construction of this new piece of furniture. As with the case of the chicken, Gustad is unable to transfer the definition of family gleaned from his youth into his current familial situation because of his failure to realize that the traditions of his youth, as static and fixed, are not directly transferable into the present.

Gustad also, however, attempts to shape his current familial structure in negative relation to his past. He relates an experience of his father "[weeping] and begg[ing] forgiveness for failing him," an event which prompts him to swear "then and there, that he would never indulge in tears" (Journey 101). While this assertion may at first appear to indicate a dissociation between the familial constructions of his past and those of his present, Gustad's insistence on this difference from his father is nonetheless formulated in direct reaction to (and therefore in relation to) his past. Thus, even in his apparent attempt to break from his past, Gustad's role as head of the family is defined (and therefore confined) by the past or the manner in which his father filled this same role. In his nostalgic and reactionary insistence upon the authority of his own past in reference to familial definition and construction, Gustad denies the possibility of flexibility and change in the formation of family.

Just as Gustad's notion of family is formulated in direct correlation to his personal past, the multicultural state is formulated in direct relation to history. Notions of benevolent multiculturalism can be understood as constructed in reference to the distinctly colonial history of white settler culture. Canadian multiculturalism is an example of this type of national construction. Moss suggests that Canada may be

70 understood as/?05tfcolonial in the sense that it is concerned with issues including

"hierarchies of power, violence, and oppression...; race and ethnicity; multiculturalism"

(Is Canada Postcolonial? 4). As it directly responds to these issues associated with colonialism and the country's colonial past, Canada's current understanding of itself as a postcolonial, multicultural nation is formulated in direct reaction to its history.

Official multiculturalism in Canada is articulated through the Canadian

Multiculturalism Act which purports to "recognize and promote the understanding that multiculturalism reflects the cultural and racial diversity of Canadian society" and

"promote the full and equitable participation of individuals and communities of all origins in the continuing evolution and shaping of all aspects of Canadian society"

(Solitudes 371). In practice, however, multiculturalism in Canada simply does not comply with the terms of this policy. In his essay, "A Long Labour: The Protracted Birth of Asian Canadian Literature," Donald Goellnicht argues that Canadian multiculturalism

"has produced the illusion of equality" by "focus[ing] on individual ethnic groups" but encouraging "little interaction between groups, so that each remains caught in repetitions of a specific 'originary' ethnicity circumscribed by state apparatuses" (9). What is central to this criticism of multiculturalism (and others like it) is that, rather than promoting "equitable participation... in the continuing evolution" (Solitudes 371) of

Canadian society, official multiculturalism fixes cultural groups and thus prevents any relational change between them.

What these critics are suggesting is not only that official multiculturalism in

Canada is flawed, but also that the historical terms to which it reacts - that is, the intolerance and dominance of settler culture - do not facilitate, but instead forestall

71 equitable multicultural interaction. Gabriele Helms warns, for instance, that "pluralism can easily become a strategy to neutralize or defuse opposition by seeming to accept it"

(9). This becomes a possibility when notions of plurality, such as those expressed through official multicultural policy, work, in Goellnicht's words, to "[contain] ethnic minority groups" (9). In other words, so-called ethnic groups in Canada are organized and thus contained under a white, English-speaking cultural norm. Razack claims that

"without an understanding of how responses to subordinate groups are socially organized to sustain existing power arrangements, we cannot hope either to communicate across social hierarchies or to work to eliminate them" (8). In its attempt to formulate itself in opposition to its past, Canada maintains the colonial terms of cultural interaction it seeks to subvert. In this sense, the multicultural state attempts (and inevitably fails) to formulate itself in historical terms, much as Gustad fails in his attempt to formulate family in relation to his personal past.

Mistry's text explores the multicultural through the presence of the wall discussed above as a structure that seeks to represent the various cultural groups that make up the multicultural nation state. Deepika Bahri argues that the wall '"stands' for various sorts of internal boundaries within the nation" (136). These internal boundaries can be read as the boundaries between cultural groups maintained by the notions of multiculturalism described above. While "the pavement artist [does] not restrict himself to any single religion" (Journey 143) in an attempt "to promote tolerance and understanding in the world" (Journey 182), what he produces is a collage that stands physically between the

Khodadad Building and the rest of Bombay (and the world) as well as defines and fixes each religion represented in relation to a particular visual symbol. This stability becomes

72 even more pronounced when he changes his medium from chalk to "pictures in oil and enamel only" (Journey 212), a much more permanent means through which to inscribe these images. The wall thus records, preserves, and divides various indications of cultural and religious diversity in a manner that does not allow for these cultures to evolve and change in relation to one another.

In the sense that it represents cultural and religious identity in a manner that fixes that identity, the wall is similar to Gustad's notion of family. The wall calls for interaction between religious and cultural groups that is defined in a very particular way and is not allowed to change. This limited form of interaction is conceived in direct relation to the past. Just as Gustad's decision not to cry is formulated in reaction to his father's weeping, multicultural formulations of diversity and tolerance are constructed in relation to a past that lacked this tolerance and acceptance of diversity. This type of reaction to the past, like Gustad's reaction to his personal past, is based on a negative reformation, and is therefore still very much caught up in a continuum of past events.

What is produced by this type of multicultural understanding is a notion of tolerance that stands in binary opposition to the intolerance of the past; what is produced is not a new way of looking at cultural diversity, but cultural diversity conceived again within the limitations of historical conceptions of that diversity.

In addition to formulating family in relation to the past, Mistry's narrative explores who is included in and excluded from the family unit. Though Gustad's active inclusion and exclusion of various members is often, again, based on his recollections of the past, the way in which he comes to reformulate these familial ties suggests an alternative understanding of family, and, by extension, of multicultural community. I

73 will begin here by looking at the terms through which Gustad determines familial inclusion. Various characters in Mistry's text are included in the Noble family unit regardless of biological connection. Gustad, for example, discusses his friends Bilimoria and Malcolm in brotherly terms. At the opening of the narrative we are told that

Bilimoria "had been more than just a neighbour"; instead, Gustad suggests that he is "one of the family" and describes him as "a loving brother" to Gustad and "a second father to the children" (Journey 14). This explicit statement of the brotherly connection between

Gustad and Bilimoria is, in turn, reflective of the relationship between Gustad and

Malcolm. We are told that Malcolm was "a true friend. Like Major Bilimoria used to be" (Journey 6); considering the manner in which his relationship with Bilimoria has been characterized by Gustad, it is reasonable to extend this familial association to

Malcolm as well. These two men, neither of whom is biologically connected to Gustad, are nonetheless discussed in terms of familial connection.

Family association in Mistry's text does not, however, simply collapse the distinction between the biological and the non-biological, but also challenges the terms of conventional familial roles and structures. The characters Gustad and other members of the Noble family come to regard with familial affection rarely fit neatly into a single category of relation. Though it is their residence alone that brings them into contact,

Gustad comes to associate Tehmul with a connection that is not easily defined. When

Tehmul is struck with a rock and dies at the end of the novel, Gustad carries him to his flat, "cradling the still-warm body" like an infant, "crook[ing] his arm to support [the head] properly"; we are told in addition that "the dead weight of the grown man in his arms was nought but a child's" (Journey 335). In this sense, and in the degree to which

74 Gustad cares for Tehmul throughout the course of the novel, Tehmul emerges as a child or son figure in relation to Gustad. But in consideration of the injury that causes

Tehmul's disability, the narrative also asserts that "it was Tehmul who came to mind" whenever Gustad "reflected on the miraculous cure that Madhiwalla Bonesetter had worked on his fractured hip" (Journey 29). In the similarities of their injuries, Gustad relates to Tehmul in a different way - as a possible equal - a relationship that is certainly not that of a father and son, at least not in Gustad's initial formulation of this relationship.

The event of Gustad's injury further connects him to Tehmul in his relation of the manner in which Bilimoria "picked Gustad up in his arms like a baby" in order to bring him to

Madhiwalla Bonesetter (Journey 60), just as Gustad later holds Tehmul's lifeless body in his arms. This, in turn, works to complicate Gustad's relationship with Bilimoria, who, rather than being only the figure of a friend or brother, here fills the father role as well.

Neither Bilimoria nor Tehmul, therefore, can be simply associated with one type of familial connection and thus suggest an understanding of family that moves beyond both biological connection and any simple definition of family relation.

The complication of familial association presented in Mistry's text is not only connected to inclusion in the family unit; exclusion from the family unit also provides some indication of how family is understood. By the opening of the narrative, the reader is informed of Bilimoria's desertion of the Noble family. Gustad relates that even "a year after the disappearance, he still could not think of Jimmy without the old hurt returning"

(Journey 14), a reflection that directly follows the description of Gustad's and Bilimoria's familial association mentioned above. This juxtaposition suggests that Gustad

"expunge [s] [Bilimoria] from his life" (Journey 221) because he thinks of him as family

75 and that Bilimoria's desertion pains Gustad precisely because of the established familial connection between himself and his friend.

Thus, Mistry's narrative again refuses to define family as a simple construction that can be understood in terms of the biological in opposition to the non-biological. Its attention to exclusion, rather than indicating a departure from familial association, is conversely that which further defines familial connection. The ambiguity of this exclusion is emphasized by the fact that it is extended to biological as well as non- biological members. For example, the situation between Gustad and Bilimoria is very similar to that of the relationship between Gustad and his eldest son, Sohrab. When

Sohrab dismisses his father's hopes for him by refusing to attend IIT, Gustad disowns him as he has previously disowned Bilimoria. Gustad removes his son from his life because of the familial connection between them and, more to the point, because of

Sohrab's failure to adhere to the contract of this connection, as it is perceived by Gustad.

Gustad argues

what I have I not done for him, tell me? I even threw myself in front of a car.

Kicked him aside, saved his life.... But that's what a father is for. And if he

cannot show respect at least, I can kick him again. Out of my house, out of my

life!" (Journey 52).

For Gustad, Sohrab fails to adhere to his part in the familial contract and is worthy of dismissal, much in the same way as Bilimoria is. Sohrab, however, conceives of the familial contract between father and son in a different way. He laments the fact that

Gustad "never made pronouncements or dreamed dreams of an artist son" (Journey 66), which suggests that Sohrab's understanding of his connection with his father has more to

76 do with support than with expectation. It is due to these contrasting conceptions of the relationship between father and son that Gustad becomes estranged from Sohrab. Thus, the biological connection between Gustad and Sohrab is that which separates them as well as that which defines the parameters of their familial association, indicating that family in Mistry's text cannot be understood in direct connection to biology, but is instead a far more complicated construct that both draws on and dissociates itself from the biological.

Dilnavaz's relationship to Tehmul is likewise complicated by the association with and dissociation from the biological. While Dilnavaz does not feel the same affection or responsibility for Tehmul as does Gustad, she does, at one point, at least, identify with his mother. While clipping his toenails to use in a magic ritual to encourage Sohrab's good fortune, Dilnavaz considers that Tehmul may be remembering "his long-dead mother, kindled by the nail scissors" (Journey 152). Dilnavaz thus positions herself, momentarily at least, as mother to Tehmul. However, she eventually places the welfare of her biological son over that of Tehmul when she decides to proceed with the use of magic that is meant to benefit her biological son at Tehmul's expense. Williams argues that

Tehmul "dies because his life means less to [Dilnavaz] than her own child's" (68), but I would argue that the connection between Dilnavaz and Tehmul cannot be defined in such simple terms. While her actions would seem to demonstrate that biological ties are stronger than non-biological ones, Dilnavaz's association with, and dissociation from,

Tehmul is eerily similar to that of another parent / child relationship in the novel - that between Gustad and Sohrab. Dilnavaz is able to gain Tehmul's trust precisely because of the biological connection between them (however brief this connection may be) and it is

77 this trust that allows her to take advantage of him. Thus, it is their pseudo-biological connection that actually facilitates Dilnavaz's dissociation from Tehmul; this is similar to how, as I have argued above, it is the biological connection between Gustad and Sohrab that facilitates their estrangement. If considered together, these examples confuse the terms through which biological and non-biological connections are defined by suggesting that familial inclusion and exclusion - indeed, the very terms of the family itself- cannot be simply articulated.

The complicated and, at times, contradictory, familial connections and disconnections I have been discussing here suggest new types of association that are not confined by history, nor by conventional notions of family. The significance of the consideration of familial ties conducted throughout Mistry's novel can be more fully explored in reference to Edward Said's critical attention to the relationship between filiation and affiliation. For Said, filiation "belongs to the realm of nature" and therefore the biological, whereas affiliation "belongs exclusively to culture and society" or the non- biological (20). In addition, while affiliation takes on "the kind of authority associated in the past with filiative order" (19), it can also "sometimes [make] its own forms" (24). It is in its ability to create or promote new forms of human interaction that I am most interested here. In Mistry's novel, filiative ties, rather than being wholly dismissed, are complemented by their association with affiliative ties; this produces a form of communal interaction that does not flow from filiation to affiliation, but instead dismisses the distinction between these forms of human connection and insists instead that association can be defined and articulated in many different ways.

78 The wall - as a symbol of multicultural representation - provides a site through which to consider the national or political implications of the ways in which the text explores the filiative and the affiliative in connection with inclusion and exclusion. What is included on the wall is also, in many ways, indicative of what is excluded. In other words, by including only fixed representations of cultural diversity, Mistry's wall excludes any identification or subjectivity that does not fit neatly into its depicted categories. Homi Bhabha's articulation of cultural diversity and cultural difference is useful here in that it suggests that difference, as a more fluid understanding of culture focused on the process of articulation, can provide an alternative to stable or singular manifestations of diversity, such as those I have discussed in relation to Mistry's text.

Bhabha argues that cultural diversity considers "culture as an object of empirical knowledge" that can "[give] rise to liberal notions of multiculturalism" and, similar to the wall in Mistry's text, may result in "the separation of totalized cultures that live unsullied by the intertextuality of their historical locations" (Location 50). Bhabha's understanding of difference, on the other hand, asserts that "cultural difference focuses on the problem of the ambivalence of cultural authority" (Location 50-1) through which it "undermines our sense of the homogenizing effects of cultural symbols and icons, by questioning our sense of the authority of cultural synthesis in general" (Location 52). The relationship between diversity and difference is not so much oppositional or binary as reformative; in short, difference works to rethink the terms of diversity. In order to reformulate how cultural groups are defined and thus open space for new forms of identification to emerge

- or to shift focus from diversity to difference - the wall must come down. Thus, the destruction of the wall at the end of Mistry's text provides the context through which to

79 explore alternative formulations of community that can be read in terms of both nation and family.

At the end of the novel, Gustad is able to reformulate his notion of family and reconcile with both Bilimoria and Sohrab not because the latter have reformed to agree with Gustad's notion of familial connection, but because Gustad has come to understand family in a different way. This alternative conception of family does not insist upon a direct correlation with the past, nor does it rely upon strict terms of inclusion and exclusion. Instead, it draws on Gustad's notion of biological and non-biological inclusion - that is, it both includes various and diverse members and allows these members to evolve and influence the construction of the family unit. In other words,

Gustad relinquishes his control over familial association and opens the family unit to both diverse membership and determination. Rather than insisting that those with whom he has established familial connection adhere to the familial contract of his youth, Gustad has come to consider and allow different forms of familial association, associations that allow for various and shifting notions of connection and interaction. When Gustad goes to see Bilimoria in prison in order to "give him a chance. To explain" (Journey 256), he allows Bilimoria to speak to his own notions of familial connection. Likewise, Gustad allows Sohrab to reestablish the relationship between them on his own terms when he accepts Sohrab back into his life without any reformation of his career goals (Journey

337). Gustad's ability to reformulate his understanding of familial association allows him to reconcile with his friend and son, as well as to conceive of familial interaction that moves beyond biological connection and continuation with the past.

80 That Gustad's familial epiphany occurs alongside the falling of the wall suggests further that this reformulation of family may be read in relation to larger forms of community. Heble connects Said's consideration of filiation and affiliation to the

Canadian national context; he asserts that these "two distinct but overlapping processes...

[are] central... to our Canadian understanding of... social and cultural relations"

("Affiliation" 242). Both Canadian social and cultural relationships and Gustad's familial associations are defined in terms not only of conventional familial or national connections, but of other connections as well, and are therefore both filiative and affiliative. That Gustad's reconsideration of family occurs in very close temporal proximity to the fall of the wall suggests the significance of the connection between these forms of community. Bahri argues that "the sacred wall's ultimately multiple failure to resolve the problems that beset those on both sides of the wall suggests the mortifying limits of... aesthetic representations of tolerance" (139). Read in terms of Canadian formulations of multiculturalism, the wall comes to suggest the failure of official multicultural policy to represent actively both the various cultural groups within the nation and the numerous ways in which these groups have evolved and changed - and continue to evolve and change - over time. The fall of the wall, therefore, allows for the reformulation of cultural identity that is not fixed, but instead fluid and thus more able to represent shifting notions of cultural difference and interaction in the present.

The crowd that comes together in the attempt to prevent the destruction of wall at the end of Mistry's text suggests the possible terms through which this type of fluid cultural difference can be understood. This crowd represents a form of community that is far more dynamic than the images represented by the wall in that it is capable of change,

81 but that is also, as a result, far more contradictory and uncertain. In its diverse constituency and simultaneously unified organization, this crowd is both multiple and that which unifies the multiple. Mistry's narrative tells us that the crowd is constituted of a variety of people "who had nothing in common except a common enemy" and who

"gathered... arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder" (Journey 312). This description would seem to indicate that this particular organized group manages diversity under a rubric of egalitarian unity. However, we are soon informed that "all participants [were to] wear work clothes and display their work implements" and that Dr. Paymaster, in particular,

"was to wear his white coat" so that "onlookers and the authorities could recognize at once how distinguished a profession was at the helm" (Journey 313). Clothed in their work attire, the members of the crowd are differentiated; they are also, however, ordered according to the prestige of their occupation. Like the wall, then, the crowd is organized in such a way as to fix people or groups in hierarchal relation to one another.

The promise of this form of community, however, stems from the fact that, as a living entity rather than a concrete structure, it has the potential to change. On its way to the municipal buildings, it stumbles upon the demolition of the wall, and decides to shorten its journey, arguing that "what better place than this sacred wall of miracles to pause and meditate upon our purpose?" (Journey 326). In its very consideration of the wall - and, by association, the static form of diversity represented by the wall - the fixed diversity of the crowd is altered. We are told that the crowd was "like a maddened monster sprawling in the road" (Journey 327); as such, it becomes a single entity, no longer defined by the various people who construct it. While this particular reformulation is not necessarily a more productive one, its very ability to change

82 indicates its potential. As it is multiple and open to the reconstitution of its multiple constituents, the crowd becomes the site at which reformulations of community and interaction can be conceived and executed. In addition to its ability to alter its own makeup and thus prevent it from remaining fixed in one mode, the crowd also, by never actually realizing a definitive alternative model of community, again defies the stability of definite articulations of human or cultural interaction.

As Mistry's text is positioned in-between various narrative modes, its form draws attention to the in-between as a space that, despite its contradictions and confusions, requires attention. Peerbhoy Paanwalla's tale suggests that lack of generic distinction can comment on national community. Following from this, it is my assertion that, in refusing to adhere to narrative conventions, Mistry's text works to challenge the ways in which history and nation are conceived. As a tale that "defies genre" by challenging singular generic classification, Such a Long Journey seeks to suggest alternative ways of knowing and thus also different terms through which community - and national community in particular - can be understood. This analysis extends my argument regarding the reformulation of history into the national context and, in turn, serves as the foundation on which to connect this notion more fully to the Canadian context. In that it suggests alternative formulations of national community, Mistry's narrative can be read as a counter-narrative of nation, a concept I will explore in more detail in my next chapter in particular connection to the liminal or the in-between.

83 CHAPTER THREE

Getting From Here to There:

Between National Borders and History From Elsewhere

The transformational value of change lies in the rearticulation... of elements that are

neither the One... nor the Other... but something else besides, which contests the terms

and territories of Both. (Bhabha, Location 41)

The examples of contemporary Canadian historical fiction that I have chosen to work with in this thesis can be classified as what Linda Hutcheon terms historiographic metafiction - that is, "fiction that is intensely, self-reflexively art, but also grounded in historical, social, and political realities" (Canadian Postmodern 13) and in which "the aesthetic and the social, the present and the past, are not separable discourses" (Canadian

Postmodern 14). As texts that bridge the gap between the fictional and the factual,

Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter and Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long

Journey work to redefine the manner in which we make sense of history by emphasizing the inability of any narrative account to access an unmediated past; as a result, these texts focus on history as necessarily representative and interpretative as well as on the multiple interpretations that become possible once this representational necessity is revealed.

Where, in Ondaatje's narrative, historical interpretation is explored in the context of sub-history that provides alternatives to conventional or dominant histories and historical modes, Mistry's text explores the ways in which the connection between the

84 past and the family, history and nation can be rearticulated in the context of the multicultural state. The interpretation of the historical record becomes a matter of how history is understood as well as how historical understanding influences our conceptualization of ourselves and our community. What results is a notion of historiography that is not rooted in the real nor in the ability and responsibility of historical narrative to access that reality, but instead encourages both multiple and contradictory historical interpretations in an effort to foster an understanding of history that is interpretative and representative, and, thus, as I will argue here, inclusive.

Alongside the insistence of conventional historical narrative on its responsibility to represent historical fact accurately is the equally insistent imperative of national literature to represent the country's social or cultural makeup accurately. This parallel allows the reformulation of conventional historical narrative through postmodern historiography or historiographic metafiction similarly to rearticulate the terms through which we understand our specifically Canadian national identity. Coming Through

Slaughter and Such a Long Journey are not just historical texts, but, as I have suggested, texts that take the history of elsewhere as subject. As examples of Canadian literature, it may seem odd that neither deals at any great length - indeed, at all - with the Canadian context; but it is my assertion that, rather than problematizing their position in the

Canadian canon, the popular success of these novels instead suggests that there is something in particular about their extra-national subject matter (in connection to, but also moving beyond, multicultural representation) that can explain this popularity. Ven

Begamudre has argued that "[Mistry] gave the writers of our generation permission: not to write about Canada and yet be Canadian writers" (11), thus suggesting that the extra-

85 national is not necessarily particular to the author of any given text, but instead comments somehow on the national itself. Canadian historical fiction, then, is concerned not only with understanding historical narrative as a form of representation caught up in the multiple and fragmented, but also with the ways in which this multiplicity and fragmentation can reflect upon the self-definition of the Canadian nation.

As Canadian historical texts that address the history of elsewhere, Coming

Through Slaughter and Such a Long Journey are texts that exist in-between - in-between literary modes of representation, in-between nations - and consequently examine the degree to which the external works to inform the internal. Through their unconventional treatment of histories from outside the Canadian nation state, these texts begin to suggest a reformulation of national community that moves beyond geographical and cultural borders, but that does not altogether dismiss these borders. What emerges is an understanding of history that informs a definition of nation and national belonging, one that transcends any simple correlation among place, history, and identity and that thus works to reshape community in such a way as to necessitate and promote cross-border awareness and exchange by articulating a notion of belonging that does not allow the nation state to remain isolated.

The Multicultural and the Global: Redefining the Borders of Identity

In the sense that a large part of what has come to constitute and define its national identity is constructed in reference to what is both inside and, increasingly, what is outside its physical borders, Canada is a country that is defined by the external as much

86 as (if not more so than) the internal. This is evident in Canada's self-definition as a multicultural nation, discussed at some length in the preceding chapter; this self- definition suggests that the internal structure of the country can be understood in terms of multiplicity and fragmentation. Kroetsch's assertion that "this disunity is our unity"

(363) articulates a notion of Canadian identity that is contingent upon diversity, and therefore concerned with the negotiation between various cultural identities; this negotiation draws attention to Canada's relationship to what is outside its borders. In The

Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures, authors Ashcroft,

Griffiths, and Tiffin argue that "the internal perception of a mosaic has not generated corresponding theories of literary hybridity to replace the nationalist approach" (34-5). It is my opinion, however, that internal plurality does not contradict or oppose external hybridity - that is, one does not replace the other. Instead, narratives such as the ones I am analyzing here work to remove the binary opposition between the national and the international. In the sense that it also involves the negotiation between the Canadian context and elsewhere, this internal multiplicity and fragmentation is reflective of

Canada's global or international positioning as well. In its attempt to articulate the internal negotiation of citizens from various countries and cultural groups, Canadian identity must refer to that which is beyond the nation itself and thus blurs the boundary between inside and outside.

If Canada is defined in terms of both the internal and the external, it follows that the study of its literature should likewise consider the external alongside the internal. To limit such study to texts that only deal with the particularly Canadian context is to assert contradictorily the necessity of this context to the exclusion of the other contributing

87 contexts. In his book Speculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the

Writing of History. Herb Wyile works solely with texts that deal with specifically

Canadian history, despite, as he argues in his preface, how "such a boundary is to be undermined in the discussion" of these texts (xvi). As a result of this particular focus, he fails to consider in any significant detail the impact of external influences on the constitution of Canadian history and identity. If the discussion of Canadian historical fiction problematizes the country's borders, why not look at texts that actually transcend these borders? Wyile gestures towards the impact of this exclusion when he later states, referring in particular to Coming Through Slaughter, that Canadian texts that deal with non-Canadian history "serve as an important reminder that these novelists are also citizens of a larger world, their concerns far from limited to the borders of Canada"

(Speculative xvi). His consideration of texts dealing with the extra-national, however, ends here.

In his review of Wyile's book, Ajay Heble asserts that the example of writers who deal with material from elsewhere "seems germane here... because their novels have the capacity to augment the reach of Wyile's argument about Canadian nation-building"

(172). Elsewhere, Heble elaborates on this point by arguing that "Canadian studies will... have to be predicated on an ability to listen to history as a conversation among dissonant voices" ("Sounds" 28). It is my contention that this conversation includes the voices of those narratives that address histories from elsewhere; further, such narratives examine the external influences that have come to constitute the very notion of Canadian identity itself and the implications of these influences. Rather than unifying Canadian literature through reference to the Canadian context, my analysis of Coming Through

88 Slaughter and Such a Long Journey attempts to move beyond the Canadian border in order to explore "disunity as unity" - or (dis)unity - in terms of the internal and the external.

The importance of the external alongside the internal - of "there" in the context of

"here" - can be considered more fully in specific reference to the positioning of the authors of the texts in question here. Ondaatje and Mistry are themselves, much like the their texts, situated between the internal and the external, here and there. That both authors have accrued popular and critical success in Canada is demonstrative of the value and importance attributed to their work and, thus, their firm situation in the context of

"here." The particular texts I am addressing in this thesis have been well-received by the

Canadian reading public, as is evidenced both by their remaining in print and their having come out in various new editions since their original publication. This suggests a continuing popular demand for these novels. The appeal of Ondaatje's and Mistry's work more generally is also evident in the inclusion of Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion and Mistry's A Fine Balance in CBC Canada Reads - a series of radio debates aimed at deciding which literary texts all Canadians should read.

This success is not, however, limited to popular recognition. Shortly following its publication, Coming Through Slaughter won the Books in Canada First Novel Award;

Ondaatje has also won and been short-listed for a number of prestigious Canadian literary awards, such as the Governor General's Award (for The English Patient in 1992, Anil's

Ghost in 2000, and Divisadero in 2007), and has represented Canada as a winner of international literary awards, such as the Man Booker Prize (for The English Patient in

1992). Mistry's Such a Long Journey has also been recognized through the awarding of

89 both Canadian and international literary honours; the novel won the Governor General's

Award in 1991 as well as being short-listed for the Booker Prize that same year. Mistry's later works (A Fine Balance in 1996 and Family Matters in 2002) were also short-listed for the Booker. It is important to note that all of these texts, to varying degrees, deal with historical material that is not strictly Canadian. That this critical recognition includes not only domestic awards, but also international acknowledgment suggests that Canadians consider the work of both Ondaatje and Mistry representative of Canadian literature - and, by extension, of Canada itself. In this sense, these texts can be understood as canonical; in other words, and more to the point here, as representative of the Canadian experience, the popular and critical success of these texts suggests that they have something in particular to say about Canada, even if (or, perhaps, because) the action of their narratives is not set in this country. That Coming Through Slaughter and Such a

Long Journey take the history of elsewhere as subject suggests, therefore, that this very external focus may directly comment on the Canadian experience.

Born in Sri Lanka and India respectively, both Ondaatje and Mistry came to

Canada as immigrants. Rather than articulating his plural national affiliations in terms of contention, Mistry directly links his Canadian popularity and his position in Canadian culture as a visible minority when he argues that this success may be due to "a fortuitous confluence of events" which includes the fact that "Multiculturalism is fashionable"

("Interview" 146). This articulation of the relationship between Canadian multiculturalism and Canadian literature may very well be applied to Ondaatje as well.

Mistry's and Ondaatje's inclusion in the Canadian literary canon can be read as an

90 attempt to reflect the multicultural landscape of the country, particularly in terms of the stability and containment that I have associated with official multiculturalism.

As discussed at the end of the preceding chapter, a reformulation of multiculturalism in Canada through Said's concept of the relationship between filiation and affiliation can work to rearticulate the foundation of official multiculturalism in

Canada and the problems associated with its official policy and social manifestation.

Critic Martin Genetsch connects the multicultural to the global; he asserts that "Mistry

[and]... Ondaatje... do not simply negotiate identities in a globalized world by exploring

Canada and its multicultural society but also come to an understanding of themselves by directing their attention to their respective countries of origin" (v). While my focus here is on the communal rather than the individual, Genetsch's correlation between the multicultural and the global speaks to my assertions about the internal and the external.

If Canadian multiculturalism can also influence or reflect Canada's global positioning or situation, then the rearticulation of multiculturalism can have similar effects on Canada's relationship to the rest of the world.

It follows, therefore, that Ondaatje's and Mistry's popular and critical success can be in understood both in terms of multiculturalism and, more significantly, in terms of their negotiation between here and there - or, in other words, their global positioning.

When asked if "you feel like you belong to a place," Ondaatje states that "I became

Canadian," but "I see myself as Sri Lankan as well" and argues that "I don't think we're in an age now where the influences on us have simply to do with the country we're born in or grew up in" ("Fiction" 90). Ondaatje does not simply state his national affiliation, nor does he reject the influence of national belonging. Instead, he suggests that identity

91 can be formed in the space between singular national locations. This articulation is reminiscent of what Fred Wah refers to as "hyphenated" or "hybrid writers," an identification that turns on the hyphen as "a crucial location for working at hybridity's implicit ambivalence" (73), an ambivalence that "[does not] succumb to the pull of any single culture" (83). Positioned between two cultures, Ondaatje is in a unique position to consider both and, more significantly, to resist choosing between them.

It is in a similar liminal space that Canadian national identity has been formed and through which Canada's global positioning can be articulated - and it is the potential of this liminal space that I will explore in the remainder of this chapter. Diana Bry don's distinction between positioning and location informs my argument here; she articulates that, where "location... has often been taken as a fixed and predetermined position,... positioning... can be fluid" (14). This positional fluidity can be understood both in terms of Canada's internal social relations and in relation to its external global situation. In its emphasis on cultural and social plurality, Canadian identity (both internally and externally) is constantly negotiating between one culture and another, between here and there, and thus is always in-between and in the process of articulating itself.

Getting There: The In-Between and the Hybrid

The inter-national location of Coming Through Slaughter and Such a Long

Journey - in terms of both their authorship and their content - is reflective of the manner in which their narratives explore the relationship between various sites, both literal and figurative. While neither of these narratives deals specifically with Canadian national

92 identity, their negotiations of the liminal are relevant in this context. Up to this point, I have been talking about Ondaatje's and Mistry's texts as historical fiction and as

Canadian literature, but, in the examples I will address shortly, I move away from both these generic categories as a way, not of diverging from the subject at hand, but of more fully articulating the connection between these classifications. Thus, my analysis is itself conducted in a space between history and nation in order to explore the negotiation between these sites of concern, not dismiss them. In the epigraph to this chapter, I quote

Homi K. Bhabha, who argues that "the transformational value of change lies in the rearticulation... of elements that are neither the One... nor the Other... but something else besides, which contests the terms and territories of both" (Location 41). This articulation of the potential of hybridity lends itself to my exploration of the liminal space of the inter-national in relation to Canadian self-definition as well as to the way in which

I will consider this liminal space in relation to the similar textual liminality explored in both Ondaatje's and Mistry's texts. Both the situation and the content of the texts in question here are liminal or, in other words, caught up in not one thing or the other, "but something else besides," and thus hybrid formations negotiated and re-negotiated in reference to both (or more) at once.

An analysis of Coming Through Slaughter and Such a Long Journey as liminal therefore requires attention to the ways in which these narratives deal with liminality.

Before the reader even begins to consider the narrative at hand, the titles of these texts suggest movement as a means of drawing attention to the in-between. In her essay

"Corrupted Lineage: Narrative in the Gaps of History," Larissa Lai connects the experience of the marginalized or immigrant subjectivity to this notion of movement in

93 terms of travel by arguing that "we have had not home but the act of travel and are given no choice but to create ourselves again and again for each new context" (48). It is the liminal space of travel that is reflected in the titles of both Ondaatje's and Mistry's texts and which, in the sense that it requires us to "create ourselves again and again," suggests the potential of this liminal space.

Coming Through Slaughter draws attention to the in-between in its reference to a small town located between Bolden's hometown (New Orleans) and the hospital to which he is taken after his mental breakdown (located in Jackson, Louisiana). Bolden passes through Slaughter on his way to - and also, after his death, from - the East Louisiana

State Hospital in which he spends the last years of his life. The title of Ondaatje's text does not, therefore, make reference to the place of narrative action nor to a place of particular relevance in terms of the story; instead, it draws upon a locale that is nothing more than a point on Bolden's journey, and thus refuses to fix itself to one place or another by drawing attention to the journey or movement between multiple places. The title of Mistry's text likewise situates the narrative in relation to the in-between, but does so without reference to any particular place. Such a Long Journey suggests the process of physical - and emotional or spiritual - travel by focusing, again, on the space between origin and destination. The pavement artist Gustad recruits to paint the wall outside his apartment building insists that "the journey... [is] the thing to relish" (Journey 184) and thus, using the language of the text's title, emphasizes the in-between as a means through which to undermine the linear concept of the journey that insists upon the importance of start and end and focuses instead on the process of travel in and of itself. The titles of both Ondaatje's and Mistry's texts set the tone for the narrative of these novels which are

94 likewise concerned not as much with where the characters or the narrative end up, but with how they get there.

Following from the context of their titles, Coming Through Slaughter and Such a

Long Journey continue to explore the significance of liminal space in the body of their narratives. In particular, Ondaatje's text, by way of Bolden's madness, analyzes the in- between by teasing out the relationship of alternative forms of perception to the liminal.

In my first chapter, I looked at the connection between perception and Bolden's mental instability in order to argue that insanity can be read as a means of looking at the world in contrast and addition to the rational norm, rather than as an inaccurate or faulty form of perception. As such, insanity functions in Ondaatje's text as a formula for alternative perceptions of reality that emphasizes the multiple and diverse ways in which reality - of both the past and the present - can be experienced and interpreted.

By linking insanity with movement and travel, Ondaatje's text further associates insanity and its emphasis on alternative perceptions with the liminal or the in-between.

Movement can be understood as liminal in the sense that it is not connected to any one place, but instead exists between one place and another. The narrative relates that Bolden

"thought by being in motion" (Slaughter 107) and connects this particular way of thinking to his mental instability by describing how, after his mental collapse, a particular

"movement happens forever and ever in his memory" (Ondaajte 38). Bolden's process of thought, therefore, is associated with both insanity and continuous movement, further suggesting a connection between alternative modes of perception and the process of movement - a process that, here, for Bolden at least, resists any definitive conclusion by continuing without end.

95 The connection between insanity and the in-between in Coming Through

Slaughter does not simply suggest, however, that Bolden's madness directs him towards the liminal. Instead, the text complicates this connection by conversely depicting

Bolden's final and most dramatic lapse into madness as a product of his being involved in activities occurring in liminal space. In the final section of Ondaatje's text, "Bolden

(thirty-one years old) goes mad while playing with Henry Allen's Brass Band" (133) in a parade, a type of performance that requires the performer to maintain a constant state of motion. It is while he is "coming down Iberville, warm past Marais Street" that he goes mad (Slaughter 129). In other words, it is in motion - between where the parade begins and where it will end - that Bolden finally loses, once and for all, his grip on conventional reality. Bolden thus goes insane while engaged in activity in an in-between space; while in this space, he does not remain fixed to one place or another, but is in a state of transition between and through many places at once. By associating insanity with this in-between space, Ondaatje's text suggests that alternative forms of perception do not only direct toward, but can also be realized in, the liminal or the space in-between.

Alternative perceptions of reality therefore both direct focus towards the negotiation between here and there and can themselves be realized in this negotiation.

Bolden's insanity and the alternative perceptions of reality it makes possible are also associated with another, less literal, in-between space - that of silence. Both in his capacity as an historical figure and as a character in Ondaatje's text, Bolden is defined by his silence. The historical Bolden did not leave behind any documents; considering the fact that he was known and is remembered for his musical style, it is particularly significant that there is no recording of Bolden's music. In "Michael Ondaatje and the

96 Problem of History," Heble points to both the fact and the potential of Bolden's silence when he asks "what better way to suggest the textuality of history than to use a legendary... musician whose very music is only accessible through written accounts of it?" and determines that "we will never hear Bolden's loudness; we can only read about it" (102). Visiting Bolden's neighbourhood in the present day, Ondaatje's narrator articulates Bolden's absence from the historical record by observing that "the place of his music is totally silent" (Slaughter 134). In Ondaatje's text, Bolden's lapse into madness is likewise associated with the silencing of his person. After, in Bjerring's words, "he blows his mind" (336) in the parade and is committed, Bolden and his music fall silent.

While one of the narrative fact sheets included in Ondaatje's novel relates that "the

Hospital Band played every afternoon... from 2 pm till 4 pm" (146), we are never told if

Bolden participated in this activity. Instead, the narrative asserts that those close to him

"expected Bolden to jump out of his silence when he got bored" (Slaughter 151), an expectation that is never realized. In both the historical record and his madness, Bolden is silent.

This silence is not, however, an empty space. In a section of text drawn upon in my first chapter, Webb is disturbed to discover that, contrary to his gathered information about his friend, Bolden is alive. Bella Cornish tells Webb that "he's still there" in the hospital and, further, that he "never speaks" (Slaughter 152). Bolden is not dead, but merely silent - a silence that may seem to mark the end of his life in the real social world, but which, in the terms of Ondaatje's narrative at least, becomes the space in which he is able to explore new perceptions of reality. Silence is not an end or an absence, but is instead, as Sam Solecki suggests, "an [end] without finality" (26). The title of Ondaatje's

97 text not only refers, as described above, to the literal travel between two points on a map; it also refers figuratively to Bolden's struggle, or the "slaughter" he must endure. In this latter sense, the title suggests a somewhat optimistic perspective on the difficulties of

Bolden's life by indicating that these experiences are something he comes through instead of being defeated by. Thus, the difficulties Bolden experiences in Ondaatje's text, rather than being what end his life or his potential as an artist or human being, are experiences Bolden endures and which have the potential to benefit him. Silence indicates a similar figurative space in-between Bolden's regular life and his death - a space in which he is silent but does not cease to live. Here, silence resists definite endings by reformulating these endings as processes. In this sense, Bolden's silence can be understood as a space in-between rather than as a space of absence, much like the references to physical travel in Ondaatje's text.

This in-between space of silence that the narrative associates with Bolden's failing mental capacities is, like Bolden's insanity itself, a space of potential in the sense that it encourages new forms of perception. Bella also tells Webb that, instead of speaking, Bolden "goes around touching things" (Slaughter 152). This preoccupation with touch suggests that, in the space of his silence, Bolden is able to explore ways of knowing that move beyond the conventional speech act as a form of communication and knowing. Silvia Albertazzi argues that "if we could stop making sense of everything we would accept the other kind of order" (56) that relies on "a constant search for new ways of seeing" (60). These new ways of seeing that do not conform to conventional notions of perception and meaning are realized, in Ondaatje's text, in the in-between space of silence. We are told that Bolden becomes a "shadow who [uses] his silence as an oracle"

98 (Slaughter 142); as an oracle, Bolden's silence is associated with the ability to access that which cannot be normally or rationally perceived or verified. When Webb first locates

Bolden at the Brewitts', he is in a bath and the text tells us that Bolden goes "underwater away from the noise" and "open[s] his eyes to look up through the liquid blur at the vague figure of Webb gazing down at him" (Slaughter 80). Again, it is from this in- between space - a space that, "away from the noise," is silent - that Bolden is able to perceive the world differently. As liminal spaces, both movement and silence are associated with insanity or madness and thus have the potential to foster new forms of perception.

In Such a Long Journey, the pavement artist, like Bolden, is a character caught up in the in-between. Unlike Bolden, however, the pavement artist chooses his liminal existence by intentionally asserting a transient - rather than a permanent - way of life.

Thus, the pavement artist lives in a space between coming and going, from here to there.

Prior to his residence at the wall, he had "learned to disdain the overlong sojourn and the procrastinated departure" and insisted instead that "the journey... was the thing to relish."

Despite this exaltation of the journey or the in-between, he finds that "his old way of life was being threatened" as he continued to work on the wall drawings in the sense that he found himself with "a yearning for permanence, for roots" (Journey 184). He further asserts that "complacent routine [is] to be shunned at all costs" (Journey 184) and thus not only distinguishes between the permanent and the transient - the established and the in-between - but values the liminal space of his transient existence over that of a more permanent lifestyle.

99 The pavement artist's paintings themselves and his experience with the wall on which they are drawn suggests a favouring of the liminal that demonstrates the potential and, further, the necessity of this liminal space. Even as he continues his residence at the wall, the pavement artist never fully gives in to his urge for permanence and maintains some liminality in the sense that he is "torn between staying and leaving" (Journey 184).

However, he does allow his paintings, which were once caught up in "the cycle of... creation and obliteration" (Journey 184), to gain the permanence he denies himself by switching his medium from chalk to paint. In so doing, the various deities he depicts

"assum[e] their places on the wall, places preordained by [him]" (Journey 184) and therefore become solidified and fixed. While the pavement artist articulates his hope that his work "do[es] something to promote tolerance and understanding in the world"

(Journey 182), he fails to note that the potential of his work lies not only in the images he creates, but also in the impermanence of these images.

It is through his experience with the wall that the necessity of impermanence - of liminality or the in-between - is made explicit. As discussed in my second chapter, the wall, as a structure that fixes various cultural groups in opposition to one another, comes down in order to facilitate more fluid formulations of cultural interaction. This interaction is dynamic in that it is in a continual state of determination and revision.

Where the painted images on the wall fail to reflect this instability, images drawn in chalk

- like those originally produced by the pavement artist - are not fixed and thus force the artist to recreate and reinvent them constantly. They are consequently always in the process of being created and recreated. Fixed representations of cultural diversity must be reformulated in such a way as to open them to the possibility of this revision. It is the

100 transience of these images - their position in-between "creation and obliteration"

(Journey 184) - that makes them sites of representational potential in the sense that, in their re-creation, the artist has the opportunity continually to reassess and rearticulate both individual religious and cultural representations and the connections between the religious and cultural groups they indicate.

At the end of Mistry's text, the pavement artist suggests the philosophy behind his transience when he asks "in a world where roadside latrines become temples and shrines, and temples and shrines become dust and ruin, does it matter where?" (338). While this could certainly be read as a pessimistic statement, it can also be understood as articulating a type of liminality that values the freedom of negotiation accommodated by this in-between space. Kroetsch argues that "the margin, the periphery, the edge, now, is the exciting and dangerous boundary where... the action is" (Kroetsch 357). In other words, it does not matter where, but, instead, how one is to get there; the journey, the liminal, becomes the space of action and of potential - a space that, in its constant efforts to see in new ways and from new perspectives, becomes that through which new articulations of human relationships and interactions become possible.

From Elsewhere: Between Here and There / Inside and Outside

While I have been arguing that the liminal is a space of potential, I have not yet discussed what this potential may entail or allow. If the liminal necessitates negotiation, an examination of what gets negotiated in this space is also relevant to my argument here in the sense that it reveals what the potential of the liminal makes possible. This

101 potential, I want to argue, can be understood in terms of hybridity. For Bhabha, "the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity... is the 'third space' which enables other positions to emerge" ("Third Space" 211). Hybridity, then, can be described as that which allows for new perceptions and formulations of the social world. The third space is a process of articulation that can be understood in terms similar to that of cultural difference (which I discussed at some length in my second chapter) and that allows for hybrid expressions that stem from, but are not bound to, the terms that precede them. Hybridity, then, is as much about the collapse or hyphenation of binary structures as about moving outside those structures and exploring other possible articulations.

In Such a Long Journey. Gustad defines the connection between himself and his son in transit, and thus in a liminal space between one place and another; in this space, he is able to explore the process of familial articulation. Throughout the narrative, Gustad returns again and again to the incident that injures his hip and causes his limp. As I have already discussed, Gustad's expectations of his son are formulated in relation to this incident; thus, Gustad cites this incident when, as he sees it, Sohrab fails to fulfill his familial obligations. It is in this moment that Gustad subjects himself to injury to prevent his son from coming to harm that sets up the obligatory dynamic between himself and his son, a dynamic that both connects and disconnects Gustad and Sohrab. What is significant here is that the initial definition of this relationship between father and son is established in transit and, thus, in an in-between or liminal space between here and there.

As Sohrab is getting off a bus in the middle of stopped traffic, "the bus jerk[s] forward" and "he los[es] his balance... and f[alls]"; "realiz[ing] he could either land on his feet or

102 save his son," Gustad "kick[s] [Sohrab] out of the path of an oncoming taxi" and cracks his hip on the pavement as he falls (Journey 58). The action in this passage occurs en route and therefore between here and there. It is in this in-between space of both travel and movement that Gustad comes to define his connection to Sohrab.

Gustad's familial associations, in addition to being defined in a physical liminal space, can themselves be understood as liminal. Gustad's redefinition of his familial relationships can be read in terms of the uncertainty and possibility of being in-between.

In the space between here and there, Gustad comes to realize that familial connections are also determined in a liminal space - that is, between people - rather than in reference to any one family member alone. In other words, he learns that familial connections are about negotiation between family members, not the imposition of his particular articulation of family. Gustad reformulates his notion of family in the liminal space between here and there, between one person and another.

As discussed in my second chapter, the familial and the national in Mistry's text can be understood as reflective of each other, and, therefore, an examination of how the text negotiates family reflects on the ways in which national and social connections are negotiated as well. This association between the familial and the national is nowhere i more clearly identified than with the fall of the wall at the end of the text, an event that corresponds with Gustad's removal of the blackout paper from the windows of his home.

Nilufer E. Bharucha suggests that "the destruction of Gustad's wall is turned into a positive happening because it prompts him to take down the blackout papers" (63), but it is my assertion that, rather than the first event influencing the second, these events must happen in concert, as they reflect the same reconsideration and reconstitution of the

103 familial and national connections explored in the novel. Both the wall and the blackout paper create barriers between Gustad and the rest of Bombay - and, by extension, the world. As such, they stand between inside and outside, and thus are located in a liminal space while also forestalling the potential of this space. Both the wall and the blackout paper must, therefore, come down in order for the potential of their liminal spaces to be realized. David Williams argues that "the blackout paper which [Gustad] takes down in the end allows us to see in as much as it allows Gustad to see out" (71, emphasis mine).

In other words, the blackout paper, like the wall, exists as a barrier between inside and outside. Where the wall is associated with cultural and social interactions and can thus be understood as representative of the national, the blackout paper is connected with

Gustad's home life and family. The parallels between the familial and the national encourage a reading not only of the familial in terms of the national, as discussed in my previous chapter, but also in connection with the liminal and, in particular, with the restoration of the potential of this liminal space.

In Mistry's text, the pavement artist compares his transient lifestyle of "arrival, creation, and obliteration" and the corresponding transience of his chalk drawings to the process of "eating, digesting and excreting" (Journey 184). This comparison would seem to suggest that the liminality of transience is, in actuality, more reflective of human life and interaction than more concrete or permanent forms of definition and connection.

However, as I have previously discussed in terms of Canadian multiculturalism, the presence of the liminal does not necessarily mean that the potential of that liminal space has been realized. It is my contention, therefore, that, rather than transience being reflective of more natural human processes, the liminality of transience provides the

104 space where human interactions can be rearticulated. Gustad's reformulation of family in

a physically liminal space and in terms of liminal social relations thus presents the terms through which the nation can be similarly rearticulated. Genetsch argues that "the notion

of the journey as process" reflects the narrative's "preoccupation with the problem of making meaning on the one hand and the problem of cultural identity on the other" (155).

Just as Gustad must explore the liminal situation of his familial interactions, as a nation,

Canada must explore the potential of its self-defined liminality of (dis)unity in order to

realize the potential of both its domestic organization and its international positioning.

Thomas King argues that "the truth about stories is that that's all we are" (2) and,

further, draws on storyteller Ben Okri's assertion that "if we change the stories we live by, we quite possibly change our lives" (153). For King, stories do not merely reflect the

social, cultural, and political world that surrounds them, but instead they have the ability to influence this world. Other critics have also acknowledged the potential of story.

Manina Jones, for example, argues that, through an analysis of "an open form that

presents itself as incomplete" (17) and therefore, in my terms, in process or as liminal,

"we may also become aware of the extent to which we are constructed by stories" (18,

emphasis in original). Jones' articulation of the connection between postmodern process

over product is here directly related to notions of community; "we" is both reflected in

and constructed by stories. In discussion of Mistry's text, Amin Malik articulates a

connection between story, being, and community by asserting that "I tell a story, therefore I am; you listen to it ergo you are" (132, emphasis in original). Malik thus

connects stories with the way in which we understand the world and, further, suggests

that stories construct both individual self-conceptualization and facilitate the formation of

105 community. It is in their capacity both to reflect and, more importantly, to influence our social, cultural, and political world that stories realize their greatest potential. Gabriele

Helms asserts that "hegemonic formations need to be destabilized through struggle in the in-between sites where movement and change can take place" (9-10), and thus attributes a political function to the space of the liminal. Stories such as Ondaatje's and Mistry's - stories that position themselves between here and there - are reflective of the pavement artist's images in the sense that they too have the ability to reformulate the social, cultural, and political worlds from which they emerge. In particular, if stories have the potential to "change our lives," then stories about elsewhere have the potential to change our understanding of the relationship between here and there.

As a country defined in terms of the liminality of its (dis)unity, Canada - and

Canadian multiculturalism, in particular - provides the terms to reformulate the global in terms of the interaction between nations. As I have previously noted, Bhabha argues that

"counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries - both actual and conceptual - disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which 'imagined communities' are given essentialist identities" and that it is this "liminal figure of the nation-space" that "ensure[s] that no political ideologies [can] claim transcendence or metaphysical authority for themselves" (Location 212). Stories such as

Coming Through Slaughter and Such a Long Journey are counter-narratives in the sense that they articulate an alternative understanding of the relationship between here and there, inside and outside the nation. As such, they are both themselves liminal and point to the liminality of the nation state. Genetsch argues that, in addition to its economic implications, "globalization... forces us to rethink issues of culture and community" (v)

106 and explains that "in an increasingly multicultural Canada 'there' informs 'here,' and vice versa. In short, 'here' and 'there' can and must be seen dialectically" (xii).

Ondaatje's and Mistry's texts are in a position to rearticulate the terms by which we define our relationship to the rest of the world.

As Canadian narratives taking up the histories of elsewhere, Coming Through

Slaughter and Such a Long Journey are liminal, but they do not confuse what it means to be Canadian. Rather, they articulate the terms through which Canadian identity is negotiated. Brydon argues that "with our choices, we position ourselves" (14). That we have "chosen" these texts as Canadian, so to speak, suggests that Canada is not just about this place and what it means to live in this place, nor about this place in relation to other places. Instead, Canada is a site through which identity - national and personal - is constantly being negotiated. For Bhabha, the negotiation necessary to hybridity is not simply about one thing or another, "but something else besides"; in other words, negotiation occupies a liminal space that, as Wah puts it, "[does not] succumb to the pull of any single culture" (83). Canada is engaged in this type of negotiation and, so, is not that at which identity can be determined and established but that through which identity can be explored. In Brydon's terms, Canada is more concerned with positioning than location. Canadian historical narratives that deal with the histories of other countries, therefore, point to what it means to be Canadian by gesturing towards the possibilities inherent in the continuing process of becoming Canadian.

As a site concerned with both its own place and with other places (and the negotiation between these places) Canada is constituted in reference to "there" as much as to "here." We cannot, therefore, unproblematically isolate ourselves from the rest of

107 the world. Canada, as a liminal nation state always in the process of defining itself, is also continually defining and redefining its borders. Thus, these borders are imbued with a certain measure of permeability that allows the inside to draw from what is outside, and, thus, inversely, also establishes the context in which the outside can similarly draw on the inside. Heble asserts that "to value the role of cultural difference in representations of Canada" is to "[open] a space for a more rigorous consideration of our responsibilities not only as Canadians but, perhaps more suggestively, as cultural citizens in a global community" ("New Contexts" 93). Brydon likewise argues that "being here and knowing here... shape the ethics of acting here" (14), and, I would argue, by extension, acting there as well. As Canada is caught up in the negotiation between here and there in its very self-constitution, an ethical consideration of here must also include there. Further, if, as Brydon argues, being here and knowing here shape these ethics, then the very recognition of its own liminality can serve to rearticulate Canada's understanding of its relationship to the rest of the world. Just as his removal of the blackout paper from his apartment windows allows Gustad to see out as much as it allows others to see in, redefining its borders as permeable allows Canada to draw from what is outside as much as it allows what is outside to draw from within.

In challenging the borders between nations by rearticulating the very terms that have served to define them, the Canadian nation can no longer isolate itself, but must instead consider other nations as well. In a contemporary world defined through interaction rather than distinction, nations become responsible for one another. A consideration of just what form this awareness and responsibility may take constitutes a study in itself and cannot be addressed in the space of this thesis. What I do mean to

108 suggest, however, is that a reformulation of our history and of the stories we tell concerning this history can have an effect on how we understand ourselves and those around us. Daniel Francis argues that "the stories we tell about the past produce images that we use to describe ourselves as a community" and thus suggests that "nations are narrations" (176). As narratives that address the history of other nations, Coming

Through Slaughter and Such a Long Journey are historical and national counter- narratives that push against the boundaries of singular, conventional historical narratives of nation. As such, they are able to raise questions about conventional conceptualizations of Canadian identity and suggest what alternatives to these conceptualizations might look like.

109 CONCLUSION

Becoming Canadian:

Positioning Canadian Historical Fiction

In that they are situated as Canadian while also taking the history of elsewhere as subject, Coming Through Slaughter and Such a Long Journey are positioned between here and there, inside and outside. Their presence in this in-between space raises questions about what histories can be told in the Canadian context and, most importantly, draws attention to the implications of the answers to such questions. My project, however, has not been about filling in any particular gap in the historical record as much as it has been concerned with providing the terms through which to consider the past from alternative perspectives. These perspectives, I assert, foster an understanding of history that is not singular, in that it does not value one perspective over another. Instead, texts such as those in question here offer a formulation of historical understanding that highlights the mediation of historiography, and is therefore always and necessarily engaged in sifting through multiple, fragmented, and, often, contradictory accounts of the past. Gabriele Helms claims that "lack of certainty or single truth [does] not lead us to relativism" but instead asserts that "rejecting essentialist notions about Canada allows people to challenge hegemonic constructions that have gained currency and to imagine alternatives" (6). Thus, filling in the gaps of history is about formulating a more inclusive understanding of history and historiography rather than about creating a more complete historical record.

110 While it may certainly seem that considering the histories of countries such as the

United States or India can work to undermine notions of Canadian unity, it is important to note that, since its founding, Canada has always only tentatively and uncertainly made claims to anything that resembles national unity. This may very well be the reason why critics such as Frye and Atwood so persistently sought to articulate the terms through which to unify this country and its people. Even Kroetsch's claim to "disunity as unity" maintains this desire for a comprehensive, if not centralized, understanding of the

Canadian nation. That this unity has remained elusive is that which makes the Canadian cultural situation so unique - and also, to my mind, what makes it a place of potential.

Diana Brydon gestures towards this elusive unity when she comments on Canada's search for "a lost authenticity that never, in truth, existed" (17). Daniel Francis likewise boldly and succinctly asserts that "Canada is in crisis," although he qualifies this by adding, "(But when has it not been?)" (175). If the nation is unsettled - if it is in crisis because it lacks unity - it is not facing a new situation.

Many critics have pointed to the distinctiveness of the Canadian nation in terms of this lack of a singularly conceived unity or identity. W.M. Verhoeven, for example, suggests that "Canada is a country virtually unique in the western world in its awkwardly self-conscious passion for identity" (283). Linda Hutcheon connects this preoccupation with an identity that remains intangible to what she understands to be the country's postmodern condition; she proposes that "Canadian writers... may be primed for the paradoxes of postmodernism by their history... and also by their split sense of identity, both regional and national" (Canadian Postmodern 4). I would like to elaborate on two points of Hutcheon's comment here. First, Canada is indeed unique in that it has always

111 struggled to articulate its identity in the face of plurality. While multiculturalism itself—

in whatever form it is considered - is not exclusively a Canadian concept, its reciprocal

relationship with Canadian regionalism associates it not only with multiplicity, but with the double multiplicity of the cultural and the regional. Canada is a country that has

always dealt with plurality - geographical and physical, social, cultural, and linguistic -

and thus has always been a space defined by its (dis)unity. It has therefore also always been preoccupied with what we would now call questions of postmodern identity. This

leads into my second point. While the advent of postmodern thought has provided the

language to talk about the instability produced by this plurality, it has not necessarily

provided the context. In the sense that it has consistently struggled with establishing a unified sense of itself, Canada has always been postmodern.

As I have discussed throughout this thesis, in its negotiation of its internal multiplicity and fragmentation, Canada has come to define itself in reference to both what

is inside the conventional borders of the nation state and, increasingly, what is outside those borders as well. In this sense, Canada is negotiating its internal social and cultural

constitution as well as its international positioning. Being Canadian, then, is not as fixed

as this terminology suggests. Instead, it can more accurately be said that this nation and the people who populate it are in a constant state of becoming Canadian. I employ this phrasing here to bring to mind the process through which immigrants might be said to

incorporate themselves into the culture of this country and to argue that this process of negotiation between old and new national locations never results in a fully formed and

stable sense of self. Further, it is my contention that this on-going process of becoming

Canadian is not unique to new Canadians, but is instead characteristic of all Canadians

112 and, indeed, the country itself. In that Canada has always struggled against an elusive unity, it is always in the process of articulating the terms of its (dis)unity and, therefore, of itself.

As Frye states, Canadian literature records "what the Canadian imagination has reacted to" (Literary History 822), and thus continues to hold an important place in the cultural economy of this country. That this literary body includes a significant number of texts dealing with history from elsewhere suggests further that the Canadian imagination is continuing to grapple with its liminal existence. M.G. Vassanji, Shyam Selvadurai, and Gil Courtemanche, among others, continue to produce works that deal with non-

Canadian histories and contexts. Ondaatje and Mistry themselves have gone on to publish texts that elaborate upon the issues I have considered here. This being said, one way to augment my study would be to consider more recent examples of this particular brand of historical fiction. Considering, in particular, the current uncertainty of world politics, texts that deal with the history of elsewhere continue to resonate with notions regarding how nations can interact in a responsible manner that is ethically aware of their larger context. Slavoj Zizek articulates his view of the 9/11 attacks, for example, in direct reference to this type of global awareness; he asks if

America will finally risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen that separates it

from the Outside World... making the long-overdue move from "A thing like this

shouldn't happen hereV to "A thing like this shouldn't happen anywhereV This

is the true lesson of the attacks: the only way to prevent it happening here again is

to prevent it happening anywhere else. (49)

113 Canadian texts that deal with the history from elsewhere may be one means through which to begin to consider the answers to (and implications of) this question and others like it that stem from more recent political considerations.

I have chosen to work with these particular texts, however, because of their persistence. That they have been around as long as they have - that they have persisted in Canadian popular culture and the Canadian imagination - suggests the scope of what I have been arguing in terms of Canadian identity and history. In short, Canada's liminal positioning and its attempt to grapple with the implications of this positioning are not limited to the present day. This strengthens my assertion above that Canada has dealt with the terms of postmodern multiplicity long before its labeling as such. In that they suggest that conventional history and identity in Canada have for some time been only tenuously defined, Coming Through Slaughter and Such a Long Journey point to the fact that the instability of Canadian self-articulation is not new and, more significantly, that

Canada can be understood in the very process of this articulation.

To conclude, I would like to draw attention once again to the potential of the liminal as that through which alternative formulations of community can be articulated - and to address one key point of concern with this particular way of understanding Canada in relation to the rest of the world. In terms of his own argument concerning affliliative formations of community in Canada, Ajay Heble asks "what are we to make of the fact that a number of cultural groups... are attempting to preserve their own homogenous traditions?" and suggests that "affiliation, when placed in this context, [may] begin to look like assimilation" ("Putting Together" 252). It is not the specifics of this comment that I want to address here, but instead the general concerns it raises. To argue for a

114 collapse or reformulation of the distinction between here and there is to risk insisting upon a universality that homogenizes rather than encouraging cultural plurality.

Aran Mukherjee argues, for instance, that universalist Western writers "downplay the local and the specific" (19) in order to focus on the so-called human condition;

Mukherjee similarly points to the potential homogenizing effects associated with articulating any notion of national community and interrelation.

There is, however, a complicated distinction, both between the affiliative and the assimilationist, the local and the universal. In her work on South African women's writing, M.J. Daymond suggests a type of feminist community that is useful in articulating the complexities of this distinction. She argues that "what is now replacing

'sisterhood' is necessarily complex: a challenge to its universalism and its hidden power relations has to be pursued simultaneously with efforts to establish a community of purpose within the recognition of 'difference'" (Daymond xix). This community of purpose that balances itself against an acknowledgement of difference reflects the process of national articulation I have been addressing throughout this thesis - a process that negotiates complexity by remaining in process, and thus considering multiple perspectives simultaneously. We need to challenge continually and consistently the terms through which we come to define ourselves, thus working to resist or unsettle any particular definition that could assert dominance and, therefore, power or control. This is, after all, the potential of the liminal or the in-between - it is a space in which we are forced to both reconsider and reformulate based on our positioning, a positioning that is fluid, unstable, and continually in process. The emphasis on process inherent in the concept of becoming can work to forestall any singular assertions of cultural normality.

115 Coining Through Slaughter and Such a Long Journey are liminal texts in that they are situated between history and fiction, realism and postmodernism, the personal and the political, here and there. As such, they are texts that challenge conventional formulations of both history and nation and provide a site through which to consider the ways in which the relationship between these concepts can be reconsidered. Paradoxically, these texts are Canadian because they are not Canadian, and historical because they are fictional.

They exist in a space between various formulations of reality and therefore have the potential both to challenge and to rearticulate the terms through which we have come to understand ourselves.

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