Michael Ondaajte – The Master
Michael Ondaajte was working on a film in Tunisia, alongside producer Saul Zaentz. The script called for a widened section of asphalt road, which the locals suggested they endow with a name. Recalling that once-in-a-lifetime and magnanimous offer, the Sri Lankan born Canadian author remembers,
I wanted the Ondaatje Road: the road that leads nowhere.
Telling for an author who confesses to begin a book with no sure sense of where it’s headed. In Ondaajte’s hands, a novel is more like a child’s kaleidescope than a traveling caravan. Both brim with detail and are perpetually in motion. Both are candied invitations for the curious to have a look inside. But only one leads anywhere. The other will only be rotated, and no two observers will agree on what has come into focus.
Ondaajte is a poet. Among his thirteen books of poetry, many were published prior to his debut novel In the Skin of a Lion (1987). Ondaajte is one of the few writers I can read mid-paragraph and be in no hurry for context. Master of writing as a plastic art, done by hand, *Process* gives him 8 out of 10.
Ondaajte’s work rests upon a childhood of intrigue in Sri Lanka, formerly a British colony. Ondaajte tells the story of the day his Father held up a train with his pistol, and demanded the conductor go back and forth just to please his whim. One can imagine the young poet, clinging to his bookbag, legs not reaching the floor, catching the stares of Sri-Lankans of a darker skin and bleaker prospects. That his father carried a pistol at all, and that he was so brazen as to delay a passenger train, says something about the place the family occupied in Sri-Lankan society:
The brushing of teeth, since he was a child, has always been for him an outdoor activity.
Such is the observation one would settle on through the window of a train, and carry with them as in their bookbag. The young Michael continued his schooling in England, and later settled in Canada among Toronto’s literati, far from a war-torn homeland.
He co-founded Brick, a magazine, and moved in and out of academia, ostensibly to support a family, and likely for the human contact by which a poet thrives. His is a rich, aesthetic and private interior life. As a poet is only at home in his native tongue, Ondaajte doesn’t so much write as he word-paints with English, a sensuous panoply derived from the minutiae of human observation. His African wonderpiece stands out.
The English Patient (1992) — according to Ondaajte — had its genesis in the lone image of a man falling out of the sky in the Sahara. Why did the plane crash? What happened to the pilot? All those things had to be uncovered or unearthed.
I fell burning into the desert. The leather helmet on my head in flames. They strapped me onto a cradle, a carass boat. I had broken the spareness of the desert.
Ondaajte is like his major character Caravaggio, a thief whose namesake is a nod to the Renaissance painter of muscled and earth-bound men. Look into Carravaggio’s paintings and you’ll find Ondjaate’s aesthetic — raw, untrammeled, passionate, dependent on human frailty — a curled toe, a lost finger, the inconsolate wale of a grief-stricken mother.
I picture Ondaajte as I picture Carravaggio — sitting in the penumbra of setting sun, alone beneath a plane tree, turning over a sprig of a rapeseed in a bruised palm. As the thief knows, the search is a risky one. Narrative may fall flat if it’s not determined in advance. Caravaggio loses his fingers when he’s caught stealing back a snapshot someone took of him. Ondaajte is on a search too, so it comes as no surprise that he lived in the Bellagio, along Lake Cuomo, not distant from the fictitious setting inThe English Patient. In all likelihood, he turned back flower heads.
Anil’s Ghost (2000) returns Ondaajte to his native homeland. The title character is a forensic pathologist. It’s her job to identify decaying corpses, while not losing her own identity amid traps of corruption, deceipt and death. As in the book, Sri-Lanka has been embroiled in a bloody, protracted civil war. His most recent work, Divisadero (2007), struggles to offer a premise, much less a central, unifying narrative.
Since the publication of The English Patient, Ondaajte’s novels show progressive signs of uncertainty. He seems to have given up on the novel as a valid genre for his search. It seems pure narrative is just not important to him. His first love, as a poet, has been language. But Ondaajte should know better. It’s the sensuous, erotic, and ephemeral experience a reader pines for — words are mere tools in the creation.
Mr. Ondaajte, I tip my hat to you, having first read you along a lone road in Catalonia, in a misted valley in Provence, and bedded in the Tuscan hill country. I carried your work in my saddle bags. Like Herodotus, I was a young traveler with a few pages of parchment. That summer I lay at the side of a woman who would one day be my wife. I read you to her, before I won her to me. You were our haunted villa.
If Cows Could Talk
In 2005, I sat for a creative writing workshop in Madrid. During one round table , I was told not to have a talking cow appear as a character in a novel. Even as I offered that Mikhail Bulgakov does just that with Behemoth the black cat in Master and Margarita, my colleagues said first you must write a book that doesn’t have a talking cow, and then you may create a world where talking cows are permissible.
In other words, before Picasso could divide the face he had to be a master of portraying the whole. I accepted the critique. So I went ahead and wrote a 160,000 word historical novel that could be taken at face value, in other words, inscribed in our reality.What I believe my colleagues were saying was that if you–the author–doubt for even one moment that a talking cow cannot exist in a work of literature, it cannot exist. To create such a world takes exceptional moral authority, and moral authority can only be derived from experience.
After all, it’s the reader, not the author, who defines the terms of reality within a text. If a reader is unconvinced that a cow can talk, it will not talk. Günter Grass argued that an absolute interpretation of a book doesn’t exist, not even for the author.
To illustrate my point, I refer to a critique by Linda Hutcheon, a Canadian academic and professor of literary theory. Hutcheon coined the term historiographic meta-fiction, which is a tough choice for a name, as not only does it conflate fiction and history, which should be dealt with separately, but it refers itself to itself to derive its definition (as in meta-fiction). I would call the literary genre regurgitation fiction. These are novels that recycle sources, both historical and contemporary, profound and trivial, real and imagined, and may reference works that are themselves references to other works.
Two of the popular novels Hutcheon cites stand out: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children and Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose. In both of these, authority and inspiration are derived from the real and imagined. Past and present are conflated. Authority is cited often to be undermined. Why? Perhaps to seek perspectives that are marginal, unseen, chaotic or ephemeral. For what purpose? To usurp the conventions of narrative–such as the modernist’s claim that we can even know history at all.
I would like my fiction to go a step beyond, that is to say, to begin with the post-modernist’s core assumption–that nothing can be trusted–and build upon that fractured pillar a story that is itself trustworthy. In my second novel, CLOVERLEAF (unpublished MS), I use a grief-struck, starving, immature and rash narrator, but in contrast to the post-modern novel that functions as an open system on an open continuum, I create a closed narrative that is fully-contained, existing by and for itself, with no need for any “extra-terrestrial” explanation. Outside of the text, nothing exists; the story is the thing.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez did this beautifully in One Hundred Years of Solitude. In his novel, Marquez defined the terms of reality, for instance the limits and permissibility of magic. He defined the extent and boundary of the world itself. Outside Macondo the rules do not apply; Macondo is the beginning and end. The magical (as we might call it because it doesn’t exist in our reality) is status quo in Marquez’s world. The difficulty is in deriving authority for this imposition upon the reader.
In contrast to film, where an imagined world is easily taken at face value, a novel must earn the trust of the reader before its basic physical laws can be circumscribed in the reader’s internal apparatus. I would argue that Marquez derives his authority from the novel’s style/voice.
At one time I read One Hundred Years of Solitude looking for a sentence that struck me as “false” or not in keeping with this over-arching voice, and thereby undermining the terms of the novel’s reality, and it wasn’t until page 400 or so that I found one. Even at that, it could just as well have been a miss in translation.
A novelist could derive this kind of authority from a narrator, as in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. Billy Pilgrim is to believed because he tells us he’s to be believed. You can walk away from the book at the preface if you won’t accept a world operating according to Billy’s rules.
Ever since that workshop in Madrid, I’ve wanted to create a world in which a talking cow can serve coffee and no one will question it otherwise. To me, the summon bonum of literature is to create new worlds. If not, then why write at all?
John Steinbeck – The Master
The first time I drove through California and laid my eyes on the Pacific Ocean, I had one destination–Monterrey Bay–the oceanside harbor and once-upon-a-time canning district immortalized by John Steinbeck.
Cannery Row (1945) is the story of a wayward, wine-drinking vagabond, who takes up residence in the discarded hulk of a boiler, and the generous, learned Doctor, who attends to the sick in their homes. Steinbeck’s descriptions of the old wharf town left an indelible impression. At 20, I vowed that I’d go one day to California and hunt down Steinbeck’s old haunts. I’d be the casual traveler in his novel.
Standing on the doorstep five years later, I knocked on the door of Steinbeck’s old tenement house. The door was locked, but a kind woman saw me looking into the window, so she invited me inside. We spoke at length about Monterrey Bay and how the place had informed his social sensibilities. She gave me a copy of his letters — Journal of a Novel: East of Eden (1969). I promised I’d study his work.
John Steinbeck’s literary success wasn’t a given He was born to middle class German and Irish ancestry, on the Pacific Coast, some distance removed from the agricultural valley that pinned the place setting in Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Of Mice and Men (1937). During the summers he’d till earth and plow fields and pick tomatoes, before enrolling in Stanford which he left without a degree. He moved to New York to make it there in literary society. He came back empty-handed.
Steinbeck was a war reporter–in both WWII and Vietnam. By the time of the conflict on the Vietnamese peninsula his political viewes had changed. Some say he turned his back on social liberal principles. To my mind, they had evolved to see the excesses of communism as a great threat to liberty. For supporting the war, he was known as a hawk to his contemporaries. Late in middle age, he traveled across America with his poodle named Charley. Some said he was setting out to dicover America. He wasn’t. He was going to tell it goodbye. For a life-long smoker, A stroke at 59 had heightened his sense of mortality. He’d write East of Eden (1952) for his sons, so they’d know where they come from and what they had meant to him.
A Master is in for the long haul — he published screen plays and novels at length during a publishing history of fifty years. To seek perspectives external to America, he traveled abroad to Mexico and the Soviet Union. About the latter he wrote A Russian Journal (1948). When he accepted the Nobel Prize he’d say, “I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership in literature.” This faith in mankind’s perpetual self-improvement is a virtue of a Master.
The controversy he stoked with businessmen and bankers over the publication of Grapes of Wrath was more than compensated by the equality of assignment he gave to each in his society:
Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.
10 Masters of the Novel
If an amateur photographer worries about equipment, a professional about budget, and a master about light–it could be said of novelists–that an amateur frets about fame, professional about book sales, and a master with the search for truth.
*Process* begins a series on “10 Masters of the Novel,” to shed a glimmer of light on that delicious quandary–What makes a master? A good writer may be adept, specific, intelligent, rich, lyrical, pared back, transparent, acessible and so on. But this is the writing. What about the writer? Masters have what aspects of character in common? A Master perseveres, measures time in decades and progress in terms of moral development. In reviewing the Top Ten Masters of the Novel, these attributes seem to be among them all:
1. originality
2. humility
3. courage
ORIGINALITY - call it reason, insight or experience. It’s the capacity to say things new. Think of Leo Tolstoy’s capacity for observing human nature, or Ernest Hemingway’s capacity for observational detail. Some writers synthesize information–Alexis de Toqueville in Democracy in America or Thomas Mann in his novels of intellectual adventure such as The Magic Mountain. Masters seeks new angles, a bold style or curiosity in form. But there are limits to newness. The Masters pay heed to their predecessors, which leads to the next attribute of their character.
HUMILITY - modesty, moderation or self-control. The perennial novelist is a hard drinking, womanizer, or in the case of female writers, a passionate feminist. Is that correct? According to Flaubert’s admonition: “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work,” a Master is concerned first with his own character to imbue his work with moral authority. The masters eschews publicity and embrace independence. They give due to their predecessors and praise their contemporaries. They don’t retreat from society like JD Salinger but are rather like David Eggers, who turned quick fame into a literary society and published the work of other young writers. The Masters heed Cicero’s advice to be “a good man yourself and then seek others like you.” The master has a gentle humility and a quiet self-deprecation, especially in old age, like the loquacious Samuel Clemens. Humility makes a small man great, which leads to number the next attribute of character.
COURAGE - the masters take risks and they fail often. In contrast to painters whose entire corpus could be surveyed in ten minutes from a large coffee table book, very little of what a writer produces will ever be read. Think of your favorite writer. What percentage have you seen? Think of all the notes, letters, corrections, drafts, and so on a writer puts to paper. Since so little will ever be read, Masters must persevere and press forward. Some are attacked, or killed for their ideas. The moral fiber of the Argentinian Rudolpho Walsh, or the publishing consistency of a young William Styron, or the raw unadulterated struggle of Mikhail Bulgakov, who wrote Master and Margarita from memory after it burned, these are what the Masters have in common
“Top Ten Masters of the Novel” will be released once a month. When complete they will be collected on one page. They are selected in advance, so honorable mention can go to James Joyce, for linguistic invention, Umberto Eco for fiction as a platform for sholastic discussion, and Willie Collins for writing novels that freely cross genre. The list is my own and reflects a preference for writers who 1. like to travel 2. identify as journalists 3. seek the truth 4. are quite singular and 5. who span language and culture.
IN DESCENDING RANK ORDER:
