Audience Participation Required:
Engaging Techniques in Coming Through Slaughter
� 2003 Devon Koren

According to many writers, such as Stephen King (King 160) and Anne Lamott
(Lamott 56), the process of writing is more an act of excavation than one
of actual creation. The job of the writer is to carefully unearth the
stories that are deeply buried within the subconscious mind. Michael
Ondaatje.s own creative technique could be described in a similar manner.
He doesn.t look for a subject,. explains his editor, Ellen Seligman, .the
work finds him. And often the whole novel can begin from a single image
that visits him. (Richler B1). When Ondaatje stumbled upon a newspaper
article describing jazz musician Buddy Bolden and his sudden, mysterious
dive into madness during the early years of the twentieth century, the
story became an obsession (Barbour 3). In this manner, Ondaatje became the
first member of the audience for the novel Coming Through Slaughter,
driven by a fervent energy to research the remnants of information
concerning Bolden.s past, and to flesh out his character by filling in the
blanks with inventions of his own. This general atmosphere is accentuated
by Ondaatje.s experimental literary forms and his personal artistic
influences, managing to keep the reader engaged as an active participant
during the novel.s progression.

Michael Ondaatje may not consider himself part of the Canadian
postmodernist set he is often associated with due to his connections to
Coach House Press (Barbour 5); nevertheless, the intricate, captivating
tapestry of Coming Through Slaughter employs many postmodern techniques.
Ondaatje seems very fond of the use of pastiche, which is the combination
of different genres and contradictory voices incorporated into a single
work. Ondaatje also addresses the inherent problem of objectivity as
related to reality, history, and identity . all of which are ultimately
influenced by personal perception. He creates a novel that allows the
audience to put together the pieces of the work and determine its meaning.
As Douglas Barbour states in Michael Ondaatje, .Invention is at the core
of the writing act out of which they emerge. Such invention will always
seek new forms that refuse conventional narrative and ask readers to
participate in putting all the disparate pieces together anew each time
they read. (8). All of these techniques are traits commonly associated
with postmodern literary form (Geyh x).

Coming Through Slaughter is littered with various experimental narrative
forms, combined with an intense .visceral emotional energy. that has
managed to entertain an international audience (Barbour 1). Employing such
postmodern techniques as revisiting history and smudging the lines between
fact and fiction, Ondaatje forces the reader to experience the mood of the
writing itself, as well as to question the veracity of the reality it
portrays. The reader is not permitted to be lazy or not to think .
instead, Ondaatje sets up an unsolvable mystery to prompt the reader to
turn each page, to read each paragraph with extreme care. .Ondaatje.s
poetic language tends to push scene after scene into the margins of
verisimilitude, away from the realistic documentation history depends
upon. (Barbour 102). The reader.s curiosity surrounding the mystery of
Bolden is personified in Webb.s ongoing investigation throughout the
novel. Webb enters .the character of Bolden through every voice he spoke
to. (Ondaatje 63), as does the reader while plowing through the pages of
Coming Through Slaughter.

Ondaatje.s blatant use of anachronisms (such as listening to a radio that
hadn.t been invented in the early 1900s in the first three paragraphs on
page 93 of Coming Through Slaughter) serve the purpose of .blurring the
sense of historical distance between now and then. (Barbour 101). This
helps to dismantle the traditional literary framework, as well as to
invoke a hazy, dream-like quality, accenting the disjointed narrative of
the piece. The distance in time between when the events actually took
place and when the reader is presently drinking the images becomes much
smaller and more obscured, like staring down a hall of mirrors through the
past ten decades.

Ondaatje attempts to dissolve the boundaries between reader and writer,
inviting the reader to become an active participant in the action,
emotion, and general feel of the novel. .In Coming Through Slaughter,
Ondaatje raises the relationship of artist and audience partly by entering
the text himself and becoming an observer of Bolden.s life in the final
third of the book. He also approaches the audience as a matter of
community; he explores how much we can identify with others, how much we
need to keep them separate as audiences as we fashion our own lives.
(Cooke 196). The short, curt dialogue of Coming Through Slaughter is
delivered in such a manner as to keep the reader actively involved.
Ondaatje works without quotation marks, introducing the reader to the most
important part of the dialogue . the words as they are actually spoken.
The eye passes over the words as quickly as the voice would say them,
though the mind is forced to evaluate which characters are speaking what.

Ondaatje also uses blank spaces in the text . both in their physical form
between poems and phrases, such as on page 60, as well as the gaping holes
and lingering questions suggested by the narrative itself . to force the
reader to respond to the raw, emotional nature of the text, instead of
trying to uncover the details of the storyline. .Buddy Bolden is an open
site . not so much for documentation as for filling in psychological and
emotional blanks. (Barbour 103). As the reader attempts to deal with gaps
and the discontinuities of the text, he/she is confronted with the direct
nuances and impressions of the words. He/She becomes an active participant
with the text, instead of passively receiving the details of a story. The
reader puts the pieces of the puzzle together, imprints an order on
Ondaatje.s chaos, and weaves this disjointed narrative into a much larger
story . Ondaatje simply provides the tools necessary for this process
(Barbour 110). In Coming Through Slaughter, Bolden explains his
relationship with Bellocq: .He was offering me black empty spaces. (91).
In a sense, that is exactly what Ondaatje does with this novel . offers
the readers black empty spaces to fill with their own imaginative light.

Michael Ondaatje was undoubtedly influenced by many forms of art and
music, such as old jazz and blues, while writing Coming Through Slaughter.
One of the major influences in his work, however, was the artist Henri
Rousseau (Cooke 189-190). Rousseau seemed interested in obscuring the
boundaries between various worlds, much like Ondaatje does with his smoky
prose . for example, Bolden living different lives with everyone he knew,
their stories. like spokes on a rimless wheel ending in air. (Ondaatje
63). Both Ondaatje and Rousseau seem to be fascinated by the duality of
man and animal. Ondaatje shows evidence of this in Bolden.s identification
with the dog, peeing on the tree after the dog had done so (90), while
many of Rousseau.s paintings display man and animal in various situations,
such as in The Sleeping Gypsy which depicts a lion nosing a gypsy asleep
on the ground beneath him. Ondaatje completely obscures the boundary
between fiction and fact in his novel, embellishing the biography of Buddy
Bolden to a grotesque degree . much like Rousseau has done with figures
and settings in his artwork. Most importantly, however, both Ondaatje and
Rousseau seemed rather preoccupied with mixing artistic forms . Ondaatje.s
work is a blend of prose and poetry, often carrying the tone of a film or
a newsreel, developing images akin to photographs or paintings. Likewise,
Rousseau has been a difficult artist to categorize, his dream-like
paintings creating a genre all their own (Henderson .The Imaginary World
of Henri Rousseau.). Both Ondaatje and Rousseau have dabbled in
surrealism, dismantling the traditional labels the world attempts to force
upon them.

There is an inevitable danger in trying to pick apart Ondaatje.s work, in
trying to uncover the various literary, political, social, and symbolic
truths. of Coming Through Slaughter. Postmodernism tends to blur
traditional conceptions of factual .truth,. and encourages the audience to
experience the raw, emotional truth of any given piece. Postmodern theory
postulates that personal perceptions alter any .factual account,. and that
true objectivity is a myth. Therefore, emotions and impressions ultimately
carry as much (if not more) weight than the actual given facts of a
situation. Such approaches should be considered when reading and
experiencing Ondaatje.s work. .The various voices make sure that no single
meaning gains supremacy. Meaning is not the point. Writing is. (Barbour
135). In such a way, Michael Ondaatje has managed to create a dynamic
script that is changed and altered by the perceptions of each reader, with
each fresh reading of the text.

Works Cited

Barbour, Douglas. Michael Ondaatje. New York: Maxwell Macmillan
International, 1993.

Cooke, John. The Influence of Painting on Five Canadian Writers: Alice
Munro, Hugh Hood, Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje.
Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996.

Geyh, Paula, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy, ed. Postmodern American
Fiction: A Norton Anthology. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998.

Henderson, Anne. .The Imaginary World of Henri Rousseau.. School Arts.
Mar. 1999, v98 i7: 29. General Reference Center. InfoTrac. Middle
Tennessee State University Library. 17 Sep. 2003.

King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York: Simon and
Schuster, Inc., 2000.

Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New
York: Anchor Books, 1994.

Ondaatje, Michael. Coming Through Slaughter. New York: Vintage
International, 1976.

Richler, Noah. .Ondaatje On Writing.. National Post. 1 Apr. 2000, v2 i136:
B1. General Reference Center. InfoTrac. Middle Tennessee State University
Library. 17 Sep. 2003.

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