Ondaatje and Colonialism

University English departments across North American and Europe went through spasms of change during the 1980s. Gone were the genteel groups of musty scholars who argued about the derivation of words or the formal unity of well-studied texts. Instead, departments became roiled in a series of -isms: feminism, Marxism, the new historicism, African American studies, Chicano studies, and even so-called queer studies. Scholars staked out political and social territories and began to interpret the classics through the lens of labor, capital, gender, sexual orientation, and the like.

As you can imagine, the tweedy dons were none too pleased. But their kind was already passing into the haze of emeritus positions. So too did the estabilished canon: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Yeats. That collection of classics seemed to dwindle to insignificance in the face of so many "rediscovered" novels and poems from the Harlem Renaissance, the antebellum south, or the countryside of Ireland.

One movement found a way to reinvigorate studies of the old canon of literature while keeping the new lens on literary studies. It began with the likes of Edward Said at Columbia, scholars who sought to look at the West's literature through the filter of what became known as "colonialism": that is, the profound movement in the West to conquer and own the world, the spread of its economic principles across the globe, the clash of its culture with others, both at home and afar.

What happened: cultures knocked up against each other and competing voices proliferated. So classic texts--Shakespeare's tragedies, Hawthorne's romances, T. S. Eliot's poems--came to be seen as multi-voiced. That is, they contained voices of the dominant culture as well as voices of the oppressed, a social or political unconscious "underneath" the words (as it were). Think of some of the books we've read. For example, "My Antonia" seems to include both the dominant culture's male-oriented vision of the American Midwest, as well as a sly, feminist critique of Jim Burden and his overly romantic soul, both of these "voices" competing for air in the novel. "Huck Finn" includes both the voice of the dominant, white South and of the African-American experience, buried under (and even in) Huck's words.

In other words, power slips through the fingers of those who hold it. In the cracks, other voices emerge, sometimes simultaneously with the dominant social structure's codes, mores, ethics, and assumptions.

Soon, certain postmodern authors began to play self-consciously with multiple-voiced narratives: they tried to set up texts that could escape their own grip. One of the best at this complicated task is the Sri Lankan-born, Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje. Through a series of poetic, open-ended memoirs and novels ("Coming Through Slaugher," "The English Patient"), he has attempted to trace the colonial impact on narrative itself, to show the competing voices that arise when a dominant power structure is laid over an indigenous culture.

We can talk more about this at book group--and probably will--but I ask you to think about "The Cat's Table" as a chorus of voices, all connected to Michael, the narrator, but also connected to the larger power play of Ceylon, its colonization by Great Britain, its liberation as Sri Lanka, and its struggle to become a modern country in the mold of its Western colonizers.

Think about the overlayering of voices that must arise when a more powerful culture is draped over an established culture. Think about the African American experience in the slave-holding south. Think about the Protestantization of Catholic Ireland. Think about the coming shift, not in the dominant straight culture, but in gay culture as same-sex marriage becomes the law of the land. Think about the ways women in corporate American must learn to speak in more than one voice. In other words, think about both the capital and debt of colonialism.

Space and CANADA

Among the forms of human expression, writing has the most trouble representing space--not only the boundaries between things but also the sense of emptiness, airiness, openness. Breathing room, if you will.

By contrast, painting is a spatial medium by definition. At its most basic, it presents a window, a framed opening onto an alternate world. Look at this gorgeous fresco by Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence from the 1420s. It presents one of the first times figures are arranged in a defined spatial context; it thus became something of an ignition wire for Michelangelo and da Vinci, indeed for the Renaissance as a whole.

The figures are not static, immovable, serene, as they are in this earlier Duccio canvas to the right. The Madonna is fairly flat, immobile, calm; Jesus is almost weightless, no strain on her arms at all, almost levetating in her lap. But in Masaccio's vision, Jesus is extending his hand, the disciples are clotted willy-nilly around him, Peter is seen to the right and left, gathering some miraculous coins from a fish and giving them to the assessor on the other side. (This is a rare instance of a representation of Matthew 17:24-27--thanks to Jill Shallcross for that interpretation.) The disciples are put in perspective, arranged in a scene, made to exist in the world as if they have mass. (They don't--they're flat paint on a cold wall.) Duccio's figures float. Masaccio's are tied to the ground.

That all said, a novel has only the frame and the glass, no painting beyond the glass, no scene at hand. There are only the words, bound on the page. It's as if a writer taps the glass in a window repeatedly and says "look at this." You look at the glass (the words) and you're supposed to see the alternate world--when the glass and the frame are truly all. The rest must be made in your imagination.

So writing has spatial problems that film and painting and sculpture and theater and even music do not. Writing can become airless, tight, constricted--under glass, as it were. (Music, in fact, may be the ultimate spatial medium because its raison d'être is the gap between the notes. Without the gaps, the notes would all sound at once, a big blat of sound. In other words, music is about the silence between the notes. But that's a philosophical discussion, best saved for another day.)

Richard Ford is a master of space. CANADA feels as if it has air, has openness, despite the dread at every turn. In fact, its sense of space may be one of the keys to keeping the dread "doable" for us readers. Think of that great scene in chapter 33, when the Parsons have been arrested and Rudy comes to the house. Berner makes him a burned, still-frozen steak; Dell dances with him in the living room. The whole scene is dripping with dread. And yet it's easy to read, goes down quickly. You don't bog down in the fear. Instead, you almost skim along through the words--or on the glass.

Indeed, CANADA is about space on many levels: the blank openness of Saskatchewan and Montana, the space between the twins Dell and Berner, the spaces inside Dell's consciousness. I'd like us to think about space and the novel: how does Ford do it so successfully? And what does space mean for the novel?

Pilgrimage: Going Out and In

Almost all the world's religions value pilgrimages to holy sites: for example, davening at the ruins of the temple's Western Wall in Jerusalem, walking the long road to the bones of St. James at Santiago de Compostela, undertaking the Hajj to the al-Haram mosque, or planning simple, family outings to Shinto shrines in the verdant countryside of Japan.

It's all founded on an old concept: the deepening of holiness or divinity or spirituality or some otherness in a specific, geographic location. It's as if you can pinpoint God on a map. "Here." Or if not God, then some emissary of God's presence, as in the virgin at Lourdes.

As such, pilgrimage involves map-making: real, physical steps to the manifestation of the divine. If the divine is localized, you need to know how to find it. Some geographers believe the mapmaking impulse is actually predicated on religious pilgrimage.

Religious scholars claim the oldest command of holiness is "Come here." The oracle sits at Delphi, the Buddha sits over Hong Kong--and your job is to get there. Religious duty, then, involves moving toward the divine in a specifically spatial context. To wit, the basic rubric of Torah, the so-called "Old Testament," is "come." Jerusalem is to be the localized presence of God, a city that calls to others, the place where the sacrifices are made to appease God's wrath, where the priests beg for forgiveness. If this is where humans meet God, you'd better get there. In the Hebrew text, almost all journeys to Jerusalem involve some concept of "up," as if Jerusalem is at the height of an arduous ascent--that is, a pilgrimage, even on mundane market days.

All that said, the basic format of pilgrimage changed with the coming of that renegade Jewish sect known as Christianity. The basic religious command was powerfully altered from "come" to "go." If God indwells each believer, then your job becomes moving out of the religious circle and into the world. "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel," Jesus said. It's one of the most radical revisions of religion ever made. His emphasis is no longer on coming to a specific site. Your job is to take God into the unknown. You don't go to God; you carry God to others.

Islam followed that Christian paradigm but also held onto  the older notion of localized religious sites. Even Christianity eventually faltered, despite its founder's best intents. Bones and grails and shrouds became pockets of divinity; Rome morphed into another Mecca. To muddle matters more, many traditional "come here" religions became imbued with the burgeoning spirit of "go" in the more easily traversed, modernizing world: the Dali Lama comes to New York, the ultra-orthodox plant synagogues in the wilds of Litchfield county.

For our purposes, that confusion between "come" and "go" that now pervades many of the world's religions also changed the nature of pilgrimage. It caused the focus to shift from the end of the journey to the journey itself. As you "go," you have to begin to align yourself with your goal. The inside has to come to match the outside, "go" to line up with "come" (and "come" to "go"--but that's a much more complicated notion, that the site of holiness begins to morph to match your coming).

Pilgrimage itself then becomes a process of alignment. It's not enough to go and hear the oracle, to march around the Kaaba, to listen to the hermit in his cave. Two things have to come into closer and closer harmonization: the pilgrim and the object of the pilgrimage. Suddenly, as you walk St. James way to Compestelo, it's no longer about there; it's about getting there.

The Nemesis of Polio

Polio--or more formally, poliomyelitis--was first diagnosed as a distinct disease in 1840 by a small-town German orthopedist named Jakob Heine. He noticed many adults in his town and others in isolated pockets in the Black Forest had a similar set of symptoms, including paralyzed and/or atrophied limbs; he began to make an anecdotal study, finally bringing together the first record of observable symptoms.

The viral spread was mostly contained to mountain towns where populations would come into daily contact with each other and not much with the outside world. The disease, however, began to reach pandemic proportions in Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in the early 1900s with increasing urbanization.

We now know that it is spread primarily through the oral ingestion of human fecal matter--or more specifically, the small amount of mucus in it. Thus, the virus can also be airborne, particularly propelled from sneezes--although more rarely so. The virus takes up residence in mucus, first in the mouth, then onto the tonsils, before moving into the digestive tract, feeding there before jumping--and this, rarely--to other systems in the body, including the nervous system, resulting then in the alarming cases of paralysis. It is an RNA virus, hijacking cells from the inside and using them for transportation and protection. Most polio infections end up with influenza-type symptoms--and that's it. Paralytic polio is actually a rarer disease.

A multi-person iron lungThe worst polio outbreak in the U. S. occurred in 1952 with almost 58,000 cases reported nationwide. In 1955, Jonas Salk produce the first vaccine--and polio was put into permanent decline in the West, although it still occurs with rather shocking frequency in isolated pockets around the globe.

That polio erupted in waves in the summer was merely circumstantial. That it was associated with flies was also circumstantial, given the nature of how it is transmitted. (The virus is only infectious among humans, no other animals.) But in the summer, more children were outdoors, more children were playing together, and more children had more contact with each other. Swimming pools, of course, became localized sites of infection because of the way the virus is transmitted. However, it is extraordinarily resilient, able to go dormant without the presence of water and become active later on.

Why polio became a childhood disease in the U. S. is still not fully understood. In fact, paralytic polio is much more likely to affect adults, not children. In adults, the paralytic strain of the virus results in debilitating symptoms in one in 75 adults--but only one in 1000 children. (FDR contracted the disease at 39.) There is some thought that the childhood pandemics in the West were again circumstantial: adults wash their hands more carefully than children, cover their mouths more frequently when they sneeze, and generally do not come into such close contact as children who are, say, playing baseball or tag-you're-it.

Of course, the horror of the disease localized into the visions of the negative pressure ventilator, or "iron lung"--and rooms full of them at that. At the present moment, there are at least seven people in the United States still living in iron lungs as a result of paralytic polio. They have chosen not to be ventilated--and so live in this artificial breathing machine, forcing their chests up and down and thus air into their lungs through the changes of pressure inside the tube. They spend their days searching eBay and other sites, looking to bid on old iron lungs or their spare parts.

I have been in contact with several of them over the years--I became interested in this lifelong, living hell several years ago--and the three I have written to seem quite content with their lives. They are all now in their 70s and survive about the way you would imagine a person would survive: by distractions. One is even married. As you may know, people in iron lungs do not necessarily need to be inside the tube all day every day. (Such a case is detailed in the current movie "The Sessions," one of the best movies I've seen all year--go see it!) These people can come out, for varying amounts of time, sometimes a few hours, sometimes the full day. As their chest muscles tire from breathing, they go back in and get "recharged," as it were, letting the machine do the work.

However, these survivors all had a mild case of paralytic polio which allowed them to live on with some assistance. The majority of children who entered iron lungs in the 1940s and 1950s died in them. And thus they met their nemesis.

Ursula Le Guin and the Science of Fiction

Ursula Le Guin (born Ursula Kroeber in 1929) is one of America's pre-eminent writers of science fiction and fantasy. Raised in an illustriously intellectual home--her father and mother were noted anthropologists; her father held the first Ph. D. granted in anthropology by Columbia University--Le Guin came to fiction first and foremost through thought, through ideas. Her juvenalia include stories of distant, unknown countries--fictional anthropology as it were. She recieved her B. A. from Radcliffe in 1951 and her M. A. from Columbia in 1952. It seems natural that she would eventually be married to an intellectual, the French historian Charles Le Guin who taught at Emory for many years.

Le Guin has been heavily influenced by J. R. R. Tolkien (his complete mapping of a fictional world) and by Philip K. Dick (the notion that literature is an exploration of "what ifs"). She in turn has been cited as a major influence by both Salman Rushdie and David Mitchell, both of whom excel, not at the realism rigorously practiced by the likes of Anita Brookner or Richard Price, but at crafting alternate, time-skewed worlds.

Le Guin's main influence, however, has been to her own genres. She has been credited with introducing deep psychological underpinnings to science fiction. Today, science fiction and fantasy divide themselves into two camps: software and hardware, if you will. These days, after Le Guin, software versions in this genre are more about the motives, interests, and desires of people in alternate worlds; the hardware geeks (like those who read the George R. R. Martin novels or watch their film versions on HBO) are far more interested in the technology, geography, and warfare of alternate realms. If you've watched any of the recent incarnations of Dr. Who on BBC, you'll have seen the series shift in seven seasons from hardware to software. If you've ever had to endure any of the Lucas Star Wars movies, you'll have seen a hardware geek trying to pretend he's writing and directing a software incarnation of his genre (to middling if not baleful results--for the best review of those movies, see Anthony Lane's here).

And so THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS. Yes, there are the bits about the planet, its politics, its geography. Even the best science fiction writers have to satisfy the hardware geeks. If you're have problems with the book, blow through those parts and get to the software. That's what we'll want to discuss.