Michael Ondaatje: Haptic Aesthetics and Micropolitical Writing

Milena Marinkova

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781623563028
• eBook ISBN: 9781441114037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This study of selected literary and cinematic works by Michael Ondaatje investigates the political potential of the Canadian author's aesthetics. Contributing to current debates about affect and representation, ideology critique and the artwork, trauma and testimony, this book uses the concept of the haptic to demonstrate how Ondaatje's multisensory, fluid and historically inflected writing can forge an enabling relationship between audience, author and text. This is where Ondaatje's micropolitics, often misconstrued as ideologically suspect aestheticism, emerges: a praxis that intimates how one can write and read politically with a difference.

CHAPTER 1

Haptic Writing as Affective Cinema

Hence the power of cinema to offer a way of speaking not about, but nearby, its object; a power of approaching its object with only the desire to caress it, not to lay it bare.

Laura Marks¹

Cinema’s ability to reproduce movement and multiple perspectives, to reconstruct unseen events and invisible thoughts, and to work by the power of suggestion reflects a lasting desire to capture the flux and mutability of life. Gilles Deleuze, however, has argued that one can read the cinematic in two different ways: as a reproduction of a cause-and-effect driven world, in which people act within the sensory-motor schema of affect-action-reaction, in other words, movement-images; and, as a reflection on a world of falsifying narratives, in which reality and dreams, past and present, actuality and virtuality co-exist, in other words, time-images.² In Deleuze’s conceptualization of the time-image, uncertainty and the absence of causality become creative vectors of becoming; they revive faith in a world that is not governed by the laws of the industrial assembly line. The cinematic, therefore, is seen by him as not merely an illusory replica of reality, but a concrete and processual world in its own right; representation is constitutive, rather than simply reflective, of reality.

Along these lines of thought, cinema critic Laura Marks has also suggested that the stripping of causality and instrumental value from the image results in the spectator’s renewed interest in the perceptual process and in the indexical power of film: the latter bears traces of material objects, experiences, and people, and can thus act as a witness to tangible lives (as opposed to abstract metaphors). A crucial role in this conceptual framework is played by the tactile, which informs the otherwise distant relationship between film, image, and viewer. The investment of the aural and visual dimensions of film with tactile qualities lends the cinematic experience a haptic aspect that enables an intersubjective relationship between image and viewer, whereby the latter renounces traditional Cartesian notions of optical control for the vulnerability of embodied perception. The renunciation of optical control in its turn allows for alternative epistemological approaches, “different ways of knowing and interacting with the other,”³ which redefine conventional notions of the self as uniform and contained, and of external reality as stable and verifiable.

This affirmation of the haptic qualities of the cinematic in particular, and seeing in general, does not call for a return to empiricist formulations of vision as a stream of optical stimuli emanated from a pre-given reality and showered upon the human eye. On the contrary, seeing is very much a cultural practice of perception informed by a multiplicity of historical, economic, social, and ideological factors.⁴ The disembodiment of vision and its hierarchization as “the noblest of all senses” have been attributed to the rise of individualism and the autonomous enlightened subject during the age of modernity:⁵ the embodied activity of “seeing with one’s eyes” has metamorphosed into the abstract activity of “seeing in one’s mind,” images have thus become “ideas” and the material human being “an ideal” subject. The metaphoricization of vision not only perpetuates the illusion of unmediated, transparent reproduction of the world, but also denies the role of the body as the site of seeing. An emphasis on vision as embodied and multisensory can therefore destabilize the ideological fundamentals of the autonomous individual as well as undermine the power of visual subjectification. Likewise, an emphasis on seeing as an embodied experience, rather than as an abstract method of knowing a pre-given reality, can challenge the epistemological validity of the external referent, suggesting instead that it is the observer’s body in its metonymic relationship with other bodies that has become the site generating reality.⁶

What follows, then, is that through the spectator’s non-appropriative haptic engagement with an image — what Marks calls “sensual abandon” — material experiences can be reconstituted. While there is some degree of idealism regarding the “abandoning” of what is a highly cultivated sensorium, Marks’s emphasis on hapticity draws attention not only to the importance of the tactile in cultural production, but also to the political import of embodiment:

Haptic visuality implies a fundamental mourning of the absent object or the absent body, where optical visuality attempts to resuscitate it and make it whole. At the same time that it acknowledges that it cannot know the other, haptic visuality attempts to bring it close, in a look that is so intensely involved with the pressure of the other that it cannot take the step back to discern difference, say, to distinguish figure and ground.⁷

By engaging with an image in a haptic manner, one renounces received notions about the clarity of seeing, the impartiality of detached observation and the empowered position of the all-seeing subject. Instead, what comes to be appreciated is the intimacy of embodied perception, the fluidity of blurred images, the mutuality of tactile epistemology, and the agency acquired through shared vulnerability. Rather than merely celebrating and romanticizing the haptic, however, Marks highlights in the above passage its disruptive potential and resistance to being co-opted into an optical regime of sensory plenitude or sensational exposure. Attending to scars, gaps, and fissures, the haptic does not cure, replenish, or expose.

When it comes to literary works, a haptic reading focuses on a text’s investment in the sensory in terms of both its construction and its reception, thus contesting the rigid differentiation between cognition and embodiment, the different senses and aesthetics, literature and politics. Even though a book is perceived primarily through vision — both in terms of its textual and visual dimensions — the tactile and the aural cannot be totally excluded. Therefore, my argument in the first instance places emphasis on the physical features of Ondaatje’s books, and the effect of these technologies of production on the meaning and reception of his oeuvre. Ondaatje’s early narrative works The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems and Coming through Slaughter are mixed-media works partaking of the visual, the verbal, the aural, and the tactile mediums. This is reflected in the generic multiplicity of the two works: photographs, popular songs, taped interviews, paintings, poems, films, comics, newspaper interviews, biographies, and detective stories act as themes, sources, or intertextual references. Moreover, Ondaatje’s involvement in the material production of his books, as well as the acknowledged influence of concrete poetry and popular cinema on them, can indicate the importance of the senses and the cinematic as conceptual framework and artistic practice for his oeuvre.⁸

On the one hand, I discuss these elements as contributing to a more conventional kind of representation, wherein text and sensual perception complement each other in order to move the narrative forward. On the other hand, however, I read the multisensory aspects of both texts as indexical traces of another reality — that of the author and his sources, and that of the characters and their environments — and, thus, as constituent of a fluid interface between reader, author, and text. With respect to both of the above points, the connection with the cinematic is important: the dialogic exchange between visual and aural, tactual and textual, as well as the negotiable position of author and reader, resounds with both the classical and the haptic definitions of the cinematic. According to the former, images, sound, and text will complement each other, building a narrative trajectory that weaves a predictable filmic illusion (Deleuze’s movement-images). At the same time, Ondaatje’s manipulations of narrative, style, language, and layout foreground the ongoing illusion-making process rather than the perfect, final product; they open gaps and contradictions that distance the spectator/reader from the film/text but also invite them to “direct” (in the fashion of Deleuze’s time-images and Marks’s haptic cinema).

Although critics have explored the influence of different artistic mediums on Ondaatje’s oeuvre,⁹ the debate has centered on the dialectics between the indeterminacy of life and the stasis of art. Such metaphoricization of the visual and its interaction with the verbal has its merits, but I agree with Will Garrett-Petts that a multisensory approach to Ondaatje’s work — including engagement with visuals and the tactile experience of reading — is a viable alternative to its predominantly textual interpretations.¹⁰ Such sensory immersion of the reader reverberates with the collage quality of The Collected Works and Coming through Slaughter: as medleys of fact and fiction, characters and landscapes, they present the reader with a “tactile landscape,” a piecing together of “little bits of mosaic.”¹¹ The reader is offered an intimate close-up of Billy’s and Buddy’s bodies, minds and surroundings, as though exploring a mural with their nose against the wall. The proximity to this unfolding mural does not reveal the big picture or provide a final answer; the reader cannot follow a uniform logic, formulate an ultimate meaning, or pass a judgment on truthfulness. Instead, they are invited to share their bodily vulnerability and epistemological uncertainty with the text, its characters, and by extension, its other readers. Reading in an embodied fashion invites perception “from scratch” in both senses of the word — anew and in a tactile way; to achieve this, hitherto taken-for-granted perceptual regimes have to be dissolved through the reader’s involvement of their entire sensorium — the visual, the aural, the tactile, and the kinesthetic. And the dissolution of prior, optical, epistemologies is inevitably disruptive and potentially violent: if Billy the Kid has been recorded in History and popular myth as a notoriously violent outlaw, what Ondaatje contests in his Collected Works is the violations of History and mainstream cultural products, as well as indiscriminate, facile and unimaginative reading practices.

In this sense I also argue that the haptic as a multisensory and intimate investment in a text is central to the formulation and enactment of Ondaatje’s artistic statement. Collapsing the distinction between content and form, reality and representation, reader, writer, and work, his art of becoming, vulnerability, and multisensory engagement is inevitably haptic. It is an art that does not offer a stable, uniform, and complete representation of a pre-given reality, but one that acts as an assemblage with the world of the characters, author, and reader. The notion of the unified self is thus contested: far from being individualized and finite, it is processual and multiple, reflective as well as constitutive of their surroundings. The proximal nature of the haptic and the sense of shared vulnerability call for the dissolution of the inflexible boundaries between self and other premised on optical epistemology;¹² and precarious though proximity can be — potentially violent and acquisitive — it nonetheless enables the appreciation of opacity and non-identitarian ways of being. It is in the affirmative interaction between art and reality, self and context, intimacy and distance, that “the collected works” of Ondaatje emerge. Whereas one may be tempted to characterize such art as a bold modernist experimentation with form — an argument for which transgressions of boundaries will primarily be metaphors for formal innovation — it is my contention that Ondaatje’s works challenge more than mere aesthetic conventions. Proximal and tactile, Ondaatje’s haptic art puts forward a different epistemology, an epistemology that cherishes the personal and yet is not individualistic, an epistemology that — in Laura Marks’s words — caresses but does not lay bare.

On the other hand, a more realist and socially minded critical camp has condemned Ondaatje’s early narratives for their allegedly self-reflexive, solipsistic narrative, and bathetically unbelievable context, ignoring urgent class, gender, and racial issues.¹³ Premised on a rigid anti-aesthetic definition of reality, these critiques debunk Ondaatje’s works as ahistorical and politically inept aesthetic exercises. Nevertheless, and despite the author’s own declarations of animosity towards both realist and didactic literature,¹⁴ I argue that these early works can be discussed as gesturing towards a particular kind of politics — what I have earlier identified as micropolitics. As already mentioned, the haptic nature of Ondaatje’s writing is exemplified by a sustained thematic emphasis on the multisensory and the intimate, and resistance to purely optical modes of representation. On the one hand, it is in the empowerment of the reader granted by hapticity that a micropolitical involvement emerges. The illusion of absolute reproduction of reality is undermined by the incomplete, dynamic, and contradictory “portraits” offered by Ondaatje’s texts. On the other hand, by questioning hitherto taken for granted optical discourses — historical, linguistic, or literary — haptic writing makes possible the validation of the “bad footage” that never made it to the big screen of History. Unlike the strategies of realist and didactic literature, the micropolitical approach, through proximity and affect, validates personal and intimate everyday experiences, those unorganized sub-group encounters that fall outside the hierarchies of History and conventional forms of political writing.¹⁵

Thus, a further emphasis in this chapter is placed on the role of haptic writing as shaping a micropolitical historiography. Unlike Billy the Kid’s widely known legend, Buddy Bolden’s life is quite peripheral to official historicization. Documentary evidence about his life, such as tapes, interviews, film reels, and photographs, are juxtaposed to one another in Coming through Slaughter, approaching the improvisational, dynamic, and non-referential qualities of his art. The collection of the sparse evidence by Webb and the anonymous narrator reminds one of the creative excavations of Billy’s corpse in The Collected Works. However, the polyphonic traces of Bolden’s existence destabilize the initial drive for optical uniformity; instea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Haptic Writing as Affective Cinema
• Chapter 2: Haptic Aesthetics and Witness Writing
• Chapter 3: Haptic Writing and Micropolitical Betrayals
• Chapter 4: The Haptic in Literature: Hiding, Playing, Educating
• Notes
• Bibliography