Creases and Broken Glass: Michael Ondaatje’s Narrative and Intermediality

By means of an analysis and contextualization of four works – Coming Through Slaughter, In the Skin of a Lion, The English Patient, Divisadero – this essay discusses the importance of intermediality in Michael Ondaatje’s fiction. Throughout Ondaatje’s oeuvre, literary fiction “remediates” other media – especially if/when those media channel art forms and artistic modes of expression. Here, I turn my attention to how Ondaatje’s literary fiction “remediates” music, painting, and, especially, photography – and how these three, within the broader framework of literary writing, “remediate” each other. I propose to explore “creases”: places where the friction, of the “imperfect overlap” of the media involved, becomes visible. Relying on recent discussions of narrative across media, I pay attention to how literary storytelling is filtered by channels provided by (a verbal rendition of) non-verbal media, so that narrative fiction itself is revealed as inseparable from the transmedial world around it.
On the one hand, such an approach considers the historical dimension of the intermedial contact(s) – that is, the emergence, use, or stylistic peculiarity of a medium at a specific moment in time and how such manifestations inform literature. On the other hand, I wish to suggest that if an influx on the part of other media can transform and defamiliarize the literary medium, it can also bring about – like Ondaatje’s case demonstrates – the emergence and blooming of previously hidden (or less visible) literary potentialities, thus engendering powers that are, so to speak, both intrinsic and extrinsic to literature. Last but not least, the historical dimension of a medial occurrence is in Ondaatje always accompanied by a reflection on history. One issue that is consistently raised in his writing is what historical presence, and historical agency, mean or add up to, including the historical presence and agency of art and medial objects.