In his introduction to Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje, Sam Solecki lists a few “approaches to Ondaatje's work not included [in the volume] because not yet written”: Ondaatje as dramatist, Ondaatje's humour, stylistic analyses, Ondaatje as film-maker (9). He gives the final pride of place, however, to psycho-analytical criticism, mainly because of what he calls “the centrality of the father” in Ondaatje's writing: “I suspect it's only from that direction that someone will deal adequately with the radical darkness at the heart of Ondaatje's vision …” (10). Is anyone missing here? Yes—the “not yet written” feminist criticism of Michael Ondaatje.

By the middle of the 1980s, when Spider Blues was published, feminist theory and criticism was a burgeoning academic field, but she is absent from the criticism of this important poet and novelist as well as from Solecki's list. Of course, psychoanalysis, in the hands of a Mary Jacobus or a Jane Gallop, has taught us much about the law of the father from a feminist perspective, but the psychoanalysis that Solecki alludes to in Spider Blues is of a distinctly masculine cast; psychoanalysis would be effective, he suggests, because of the presence and textual domination of the father. That paternal domination is no less felt in the critical writing inspired by the poems, novels, and films of Michael Ondaatje.

There are, to begin, not very many women critics writing on Ondaatje. The essay collection Spider Blues, for example, has five women contributors (four essayists, one bibliographer) and fourteen male ones. And though women critics have written on Ondaatje—most notably Linda Hutcheon, Manina Jones, Constance Rooke, Smaro Kamboureli, and Anne Blott—they have focused on issues other than gender, even though gender has been a prominent feature of the other critical writings of most of them. This is also true, I must add in a shamefaced postscript, of my own limited work on Ondaatje. So why don't we have a gender criticism of Ondaatje in the nineties?

My hypothesis is as follows: feminist critics shied away from Ondaatje because they assumed that there wasn't much to write about, or that, if they did write, they would end up compiling a survey of “images of women” in Ondaatje—in essence, a catalogue of Atwoodian victim positions—which would be theoretically sparse and of limited use. And standing before them was this body of criticism—for example, the work of critics such as Sam Solecki, Dennis Cooley, and Stephen Scobie—much of it very good, but, taken as a whole, belonging to a male milieu. Take the critical commentary on the cover of Ondaatje's selected poems, There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do, if you think that I'm overstating the case. Stephen Scobie opens his review of the volume, reprinted in Spider Blues, with the following accolade:

Only Ondaatje, people say, shaking their heads in knowing admiration, only Michael could have found the cover illustration. A woman stands against a wooden board, a target, with knives all around her; the words of the title also cluster around, she is their target too. … Only Ondaatje, they say, could have found this photograph. …

(117)

Hmmm. And if you're a bit taken aback by that word “admiration,” then let's consider a similar comment by George Bowering:

On the cover of Michael Ondaatje's selected shorter poems, There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do (1979), there is a photograph of a seated man using his left foot to throw knives around the body of a woman who looks like Dorothy Livesay. Whether or not that says anything about the course of Canadian poetry, it does suggest the nature of Ondaatje's wit.

(64)

To quote a line from The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, “HAWHAWHAW” (57). Witty, isn't it? And there's the added delight of imagining a pioneering Canadian feminist poet pinned and wriggling on a board, a target for a male poet's word knives, just to sharpen the edge of the “wit.”

I haven't been alone in my gendered distance from some of this criticism and its assumptions. In a review of Spider Blues, Susan Gingell briefly takes issue with a comment by Sam Solecki about the unnamed woman in Ondaatje's second book of poetry, The Man with Seven Toes. He claims that she has “simultaneously positive and negative responses to her rape” (“Point Blank” 141). “Has any woman ever perceived any aspect of rape positively?” Gingell tartly inquires (216).

I do not intend to pen an indictment of Michael Ondaatje's critics, even though I have had a few tart comments of my own to offer in the preceding paragraphs. Nor will I launch into a massive debunking of Ondaatje, a writer whom I admire and whose works I enjoy reading, though I will not offer an apology for his “tricks with a knife” either. I aim, rather, to acknowledge the silences and assumptions of both critical and poetic texts, and to move from there to a more intensive project of studying the role of women and gender in Ondaatje's works in all of its contradictoriness and complexity. This is not to say that indictment of any male author has no place, no useful function in feminist criticism. For all of its flaws, one must applaud the locus classicus of feminist indictments, Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970), simply because of its energizing, astringent effect on women readers and critics, who, after the book appeared, could feel that they had a right to a dissenting voice, a right to be what Judith Fetterley has since termed a “resisting reader.” By the same token, indictment should not be the only strategy available to feminist critics dealing with men's texts, especially if those texts reveal a complex working of the variable of gender.

Feminist critics who have chosen not to indict the men's texts that they find of interest to feminist studies tend to be somewhat defensive about the charge of being apologists. Susan Rudy Dorscht, for instance, in the first chapter of her book Women, Reading, Kroetsch: Telling the Difference, guards herself against that charge by taking one giant step backwards from her earlier critical position, that Kroetsch is amenable to feminist purposes because “a … simple deconstruction of the subject” renders sexual difference null, and because his works are full of such productive subjective decentrings (16). Instead, Dorscht argues that feminist readings of Kroetsch are her focal point; they offer the “challenges to notions of self, origin, truth and meaning” that are “allied with feminist practice” (22), let Kroetsch's texts say what they will. This is critical damage control of a sort, undertaken to avoid a charge of providing an apology for a writer whose gender politics are, shall we say, complex.

Male critics who are interested in bringing gender issues to bear in their discussions of men's works must also negotiate the Scylla and Charybdis of indictment and apologetics, though the dynamics are quite different (see Heath). To indict a male author out of sympathy with feminist aims may make the male critic sound embarrassingly like a rescuing knight for helpless women readers and critics, while to apologize for that author is implicitly to defend oneself and one's critical practices; as Stephen Heath puts it, “Men's relation to feminism is an impossible one” (193).

In a recent (1992) article on the issue of violence in Ondaatje's work, Christian Bök opens, if briefly, a discussion of gender, one that attempts to negotiate these “impossible” critical stances. In the couple of paragraphs where he considers violence against women, he notes that “Women as artists in fact do not appear to figure largely in Ondaatje's aesthetic vision; instead, women appear to represent the passive victims of male volatility” (116). Bök promptly acknowledges artist characters such as Clara, Alice, and Anne from In the Skin of a Lion in an endnote, but he claims that they are either exploited by males or socially marginalized (122). He then laments the lack of “explicit moral judgements about such patriarchal violence” in Ondaatje (116). In light of the examples I cited earlier of male critics' insensitivity to gender problematics in Ondaatje, this seems a brave stance to take, but the net effect of Bök's indictment is to downplay the moments in Ondaatje's texts when women are not victims, when the text discloses its own gender complexities and inconsistencies—moments that I will analyse in the rest of this paper. Besides, indictment is often associated with prescriptive criticism, and Bök's call for “explicit moral judgements” seems a touch Zhdanovian (see Eagleton 37-40).

Though Bök does not engage in apologetics of a correspondingly explicit sort, he is, at times, tempted to frame a narrative of conversion in describing Ondaatje's poems and novels. He claims, for instance, that “Ondaatje's romanticization of violent males does begin, nevertheless, to undergo some reappraisal in Running in the Family,” and he bases his argument on his sense of Mervyn Ondaatje as “tragic” and pitiable rather than glorified (116, 117). (I think he is both—another classic example of Ondaatjean mixedness.) In accounting for the change that he discerns in the later works, Bök emphasizes that “Ondaatje in effect does not reform his politics so much as qualify his romantic ethos” (119). And yet, Bök's article concludes this way:

While Ondaatje has always emphasized that artistic innovation does not occur without some act of violent intensity, of extreme defamiliarization, he no longer appears to value such intensity purely for its own sake or for its privileged ability to generate a private vision that turns its back upon generalized oppression; instead, he values such intensity for its ability to energize a collective, social vision that resists specific forms of ideological authority.

(122)

That does sound like political reformation. Narratives of progress are difficult to resist, though they can shade all too easily into apologetics.

Keeping this in mind, I will examine the evidence that gender, as a category of inquiry and thought, assumes greater importance in Ondaatje's later work, because I agree with Bök that something interesting and new is happening in the texts of the eighties and nineties, but I will not sketch any sort of conversion scenario, whereby “formerly patriarchal writer sees the light and adopts affirmative stances.” The texts, in all of their political complexity, seem to deny such a narrativization. The changes that do occur in Ondaatje's later works are neither unproblematic nor linear, and they involve more than Ondaatje softening his line on violent males. Gradually, there is more awareness of issues of gender, especially as they relate to ownership—the poet's ownership of the material, the patriarch's ownership of the female, and the imperialist's ownership of the colonized. But vestiges of traditional gender assumptions linger even in the most recent works, “shapeless, awkward / moving to the clear” (Rat Jelly 62), but never achieving clarity, stasis, or conversion.

The traditional, Thurberesque war between men and women has been a feature of Ondaatje's writing both early and recent. In “A House Divided,” from the first collection of poetry, The Dainty Monsters, the language of war is explicitly invoked in this farcical confrontation:

Your body, eager
for the extra yard of bed,
reconnoitres and outflanks;
I bend in peculiar angles.

This nightly battle is fought with subtleties:

you get pregnant, I'm sure,
just for extra ground
—immune from kicks now.

(38)

The title of a series of Thurber cartoons graces one of the sections of Running in the Family, the episode where a man on a bus fondles Lalla's foam breast: “The War between Men and Women.” And it resurfaces, once again, slightly altered, to serve as the title for one of the poems in Secular Love: “(The Linguistic War between Men and Women).” These explicit references to the war of the sexes typically occur in lighter poems, as though to lampoon the very notion of a serious battle between male and female.

But, in the later works, alongside the lampoons, one occasionally finds the soberer skirmishes of heterosexual romance. In Running in the Family, for instance, a farcical account of a marriage trick rapidly fades into a glimpse of a more serious domestic battle: Lalla, to poke fun at Mervyn's Tamil background, “had two marriage chairs decorated in a Hindu style and laughed all through the ceremony. The incident was, however, the beginning of a war with my father” (119). In retrospect, laughter dissolves into crossfire. We later hear of Mervyn's planting of cacti and roses in order to discourage Lalla's botanical plundering, and, later still, in the section graced by the Thurberesque title “‘What We Think of Married Life,’” the scenario darkens further: Mervyn “reportedly couldn't stand his mother-in-law, Lalla, for what he saw as her crudeness, although the stories about my father are closer in style to those about Lalla than anyone else” (169). Here the domestic war emerges as a complicated palimpsest; Mervyn can displace onto Lalla his own mortification at the embarrassment he causes his wife, Doris, by his own Lallaesque exploits.

Clearly, farcical gender wars may also be read as major traumas. Ondaatje may find the performance given by his siblings, and stage-managed by Doris, when Mervyn is drinking (“Daddy, don't drink, daddy, if you love us” [170]) to be thrilling dramaturgy, but his older brother and sister feel “guilty and miserable” “for days after” (171). Perhaps Thurber's “The War between Men and Women” isn't that far removed from Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? after all.

Another aspect of Thurberesque gender comedy looms largest in Ondaatje's earliest works: female stereotypes. These are drawn at their broadest in his first book of poems, The Dainty Monsters, though the echoes are more of early T. S. Eliot than of Thurber. In “Henri Rousseau and Friends,” for instance, we hear of the douanier's waltzing man, tiger, and bird hanging

scattered like pearls
in just as intense a society.
On Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot's walls,
with Lillie P. Bliss in New York.

(26)

The adage about “casting pearls before swine” lingers in the air; clearly, in this early poem, to adapt Eliot (from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock), “the women come and go / Talking of douanier Rousseau.” But the Eliotic disdain disappears from Ondaatje's work, even if traces of Thurberesque nervousness remain; we find few such passages in the poetry and prose to come. Indeed, in the next book of poetry and prose, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Ondaatje sports with the stereotypes of the helpless heroine and the femme fatale in the comic section “Billy the Kid and the Princess”: “Gracias Señor. You are so strong and brave … and very gallant!”; “This table needs a man like you, Señor Bonney. Others have occupied that chair but none so well as you” (99, 100). In a more serious vein, Coming through Slaughter appears to set up the opposing stereotypes of woman versus whore (“The women wore Gloria de Dijon and Marshall Neil roses and the whores sold ‘Goofer Dust’ and ‘Bend-Over Oil’” [9]), but then breaks down those stereotypes in the figure of Nora Bolden: a wife (read “respectable”) and former prostitute—or is she still involved with her pimp, Tom Pickett? We never know, and so we are unable to reformulate those supposedly oppositional terms whore and wife.

The feature of Ondaatje's writing that has, more than the use of stereotypes, kept feminist analysis at a distance is what I'd like to call “the male chaotic”—a realm of seemingly random, centrifugal violent energy, associated with males and either opposed or ignored by females. It dominates the early poetry, particularly the first collection, The Dainty Monsters. There it exists, for example, in the Ted Hughesian chaos that takes over the domestic space of “The Republic”:

While we sleep
the plants in frenzy heave floors apart,
lust with common daisies,
feel rain,
fling their noble bodies, release a fart.
The clock alone, frigid and superior,
swaggers in the hall.
At dawn gardenias revitalize
and meet the morning with decorum.

(20)

Plants lust with daisies, which are, in turn, associated with decorum-loving morning gardenias: the gendered division between male plant and female flowers is clear. Indeed, this recalls not only Hughes, but a Canadian predecessor, Dorothy Livesay (she of the book-cover dartboard). In her 1952 poem “Bartok and the Geranium,” the Bartok music is the male chaotic rampant, and the geranium the quieter—but surviving—female flower. In Ondaatje's early poem, however, sympathies are more heavily invested in the lusty plants; to resist the male chaotic is to be “frigid.”

Livesay's poem echoes again in another, similarly spirited poem from The Dainty Monsters, “The Diverse Causes,” wherein a close relative of the whirling, frenzied Bartok of Livesay's poem, Stravinsky, “roars at breakfast” over the glumly domestic powdered milk (22). But here the two realms nudge closer; the mundane details of frost on the window and the speaker's daughter dangling her red-shoed feet over the lake water suddenly give way to the Stravinsky roar of energy and chaos when they are transformed into a “scarred” window and a girl who “burns the lake” (22, 23). They can only be thus metamorphosed, however, through the eyes of the poet as he filters his domestic world through the refracting lenses of the male chaotic.

Indeed, the daughter's obliviousness, legs suspended over the lake she is metaphorically igniting, is shared by many of the women in the early poetry when they are confronted by the male chaotic. The female lover or wife of “The Diverse Causes” is sleeping while the male poet observes the “moving” “that turns like fire” under her eyelid (22); she, too, is ignorant of the fires of the chaotic. We are but a hop and a jump away from that other sleeping woman, the wife in “Spider Blues” (from Rat Jelly) who is similarly unconscious of the chaotic workings of the male artists-spiders-poets. Again, it is the poet-speaker who witnesses the “scene” (65), and who can exclaim at its beauty and lock it, like the suspended woman, into his poem. But the sense of uneasiness at this distinction between the male poet conscious of the chaotic and the unconscious, dreaming, art-object woman increases tenfold in “Spider Blues.” At the beginning of the poem, for example, the wife's body is described as “dreaming,” but later in the poem the poet refers to the ending as a “Nightmare for my wife and me” (63, 65). The grammatical parity suggested by the conjunction “and” only underscores the fact that the “Nightmare” is not the same for the two participants, just as the calculated domestic melodrama that the Ondaatje children perform in Running in the Family is different for the performers than for Ondaatje himself, who was too young at the time to participate. The poet can witness the nightmare, whereas the woman is, to use an Ondaatjean coinage, “nightmared”; the term is here used in an appropriately passive sense. By the last stanza, the dream moves out of the private orbit of its original owner, the woman: now the “air” is “dreaming” (65); that is, the dream has ceased to inhabit the private and is now floating out into the public realm, out of the woman's control. By the end of the poem, the dream belongs only to the “black architects” of her fate; it is “their dream,” once they have sucked it out of the woman-fly (65).

Of course, “Spider Blues” has affinities with other Ondaatje joke poems or prose passages, and a good number of these jokes involve women as the objects of humour (see “Notes for the Legend of Salad Woman” and “Letter to Ann Landers,” both from Rat Jelly, and “Sweet Like a Crow,” from There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do, reprinted in Running in the Family). In “Over the Garden Wall” from The Dainty Monsters, for instance, we find the first in a series of breast jokes:

My mother while caressing camels
had her left breast bitten off,
so I was weaned on half a body.
In spite of this I've no objections
to camels, one hump or two …

(30)

The circular metaphor is worthy of note: mother caresses camels and metaphorically becomes a one-humped camel as a result. Then there are the various misadventures of Lalla and her foam breast, the result of an unnecessary mastectomy: it crawls over her back, joins its fleshy twin, gets gnawed by the pet dog, et cetera. It comes as no surprise, then, that one of the eliminations in Ondaatje's Elimination Dance reads as follows: “Women who gave up the accordion because of pinched breasts” (28). (To be fair, Ondaatje does manage to work a penis joke into that work, as well, for the sake of gender parity: “Anyone who has mistaken a flasher's penis for a loaf of bread while cycling through France” [14]). But my intention here is not simply to list these jokes, shaking my head in dour disapproval. What interests me, instead, is the way the woman-object jokes are, for the most part, first muted and then phased out in the later works. For instance, the jokes directed against women (like those directed against men) in Running in the Family are of a gentler, less dehumanizing timbre: “A Mr Hobday has asked my father if he has any Dutch antiques in the house. And he replies, ‘Well … there is my mother.’ My grandmother lower down gives a roar of anger” (27). But then, this book emphasizes and celebrates the contextual—“each memory a wild thread in the sarong” (110), as Ondaatje refers to his aunts' stories and to his own—and the contextual renders humour of a severing, objectifying sort alien, out of place. In later volumes such as Secular Love, In the Skin of a Lion, and The English Patient, the woman joke finds no place at all—a sign in itself that gender has become more complex and problematic for Ondaatje.

This observation would seem to suggest that there is some rethinking of the commodification of women going on in Ondaatje's poems and novels, though I would emphasize again that this process is not a linear, progressive one. In a poem from the “Pig Glass” section of There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do, “Farre Off,” the poet's desire to write poems as stunning as Thomas Campion's and Sir Thomas Wyatt's is matched by his desire to possess the elusive female who is characteristic of Wyatt's best-known lyric, “They Flee from Me.” “Women Like You,” a poem included in Running in the Family, is very close in spirit to “Farre Off,” for it celebrates a communal love poem, “Hundreds of small verses / by different hands” (93), written to sublimely unreachable female lovers. In these “small verses,” text and body overlap once more, forming “an alphabet / whose motive was perfect desire” (93). The second half of the poem shades into the poet-speaker's twentieth-century alphabet of desire, one that includes a blazon that Wyatt and Campion would no doubt recognize as an intelligible part of their poetic world:

you long eyed women
the golden
drunk swan breasts
lips
the long long eyes

(94)

Still, one might argue, it's difficult to imagine a more straightforward recognition and critique of the commodification of women's bodies than the opening pages of Coming through Slaughter, with their intense focus on the Storyville prostitutes. But gender in this novel is no easier, no less complicated than in Ondaatje's other works. Reconsidered, the fascination with the buying and selling of women in those opening pages acts mainly as a prelude to—and reflection of—the novel's central concern with the buying and selling of artists such as Bolden; as Bolden later reflects when he sees the horribly abused mattress whores, “My brain tonight has a mattress strapped to its back” (119).

Though critics of the novel have spelled out the sense of complicity with which Ondaatje approaches the early jazz master, none has considered another possible meditation offered up by the novel: the complicity of the poet with the buyer and user of women. Of course, this is exactly what Bolden himself does. He is complicit with Bellocq's project of photographing the prostitutes in that he convinces some of the women to pose. That assistance not only marks him as a patron of the more sensitive elements of the artwork (“What you see in his pictures is her mind jumping that far back to when she would dare to imagine the future, parading with love or money on a beautiful anonymous cloth arm” [54]), but it also makes him complicit with the knife slashes Bellocq inflicts on those photographed bodies. We have here an implicit portrait of the artist as complicit commodifier of the female.

This strain of self-conscious poetic indictment is a much more marked presence in recent works. Patrick of In the Skin of a Lion “wondered if at first she had been something he wanted to steal, not because she was Clara but because she belonged to the enemy. But now there was her character” (72). The passage itself modulates from generic commodity to humanizing name, from a “something” and a “she” to “Clara.” This is, in mirrored form, the nagging doubt of the self-conscious poetic “stealer” of women. It surfaces in more explicit terms in Running in the Family, when Ondaatje opens the chapter entitled “Aunts” with one simple sentence of self-indictment: “How I have used them” (110).

What Ondaatje—and we—are launching into here is a study of the gender politics of the writer's gaze, and so it should not be surprising that gazes themselves may become more politicized along gender lines in the later work. This doesn't seem to be the case in the poem “To Colombo” from Running in the Family, its last line imagistically objectifying the female: “the woman the coconuts the knife” (91). But in The English Patient, there is a complicated dance of gazes, of acts of perception that speak volumes about gender and colonial power. Caravaggio can gaze at, and muse about, Hana when he comes upon her sleeping in the library, but she quickly wakes when he sneezes, “the eyes open staring ahead at him” (81). This very phrase emphasizes Hana's unabashed act of concentrated looking. In a moment, she has chosen to reveal one of her most precious secrets to Caravaggio's gaze—her decision to end her pregnancy. And, in the scene that ensues, Hana takes control of perception in order to critique nationalism's objectification and disposal of human beings:

“My country taught me all this. It's what I did for them during the war.”

He went through the bombed chapel into the house.

Hana sat up, slightly dizzy, off balance. “And look what they did to you,” she said to herself.

(85)

Hana here echoes another Ondaatjean woman, Nora Bolden, who directs perception for her interlocutor, Buddy, in a more pointed fashion: “Look at you. Look at what he did to you. Look at you. Look at you. Goddamit. Look at you” (127). Some of the sleeping women of Ondaatje's early works have woken up to assume narrative and to direct the gaze.

In the Katharine-Almásy love-affair section of The English Patient, this battle of direct gazes intensifies, mainly because Almásy does not expect to be the object of a woman's steady gaze: “I see her still, always, with the eye of Adam. … Now I think she was studying me. … She was studying me. Such a simple thing. And I was watching for one wrong move in her statue-like gaze, something that would give her away” (144-45). So simple, and so unexpected from Adam's Eve. As John Berger, a writer much admired by Ondaatje, has phrased it,

[M]en act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

(47)

One of the most striking scenes in The English Patient is the one in which Hana, playing the piano, becomes “a sight”—the object of two unfamiliar men's gazes. The men have placed their guns on the end of the piano, and these gaze at Hana, too. But Hana's gaze remains riveted on her piano keys and her art—a matriarchal art, for she plays a song taught her by her mother, Alice. She refuses to allow those two supreme signifiers of patriarchal power, men and guns, to dominate more than her peripheral vision for those few minutes.

What Hana does, in effect, is merge what Berger calls “the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman”: “the surveyor and the surveyed” (46); she clings tenaciously to her act of artistic sight, and at the same time she is conscious of being powerfully sighted. But postcolonial variables lend this scene of gender gaze further complexity. In a sense, Hana, playing this Western tune before Kip, the Sikh man who will become her lover, is aiming a gun of sorts, too. Only a couple of pages later, we hear that “Caravaggio grumbles at [Kip's] continuous humming of Western songs he has learned for himself in the last three years of the war” (73). By the end of the novel, Kip will refuse to dance to the tunes of the West; Hiroshima and Nagasaki will have changed all that, and they will have altered forever the gazes of the four main characters of this novel.

For Berger, and for other political critics of the gaze, to see is an act of penetration. Ondaatje appears to be rethinking this act, and so one is prompted to ask: What of all the acts of penetration in his work, the knives, the scars? Are they being rethought too? In “Christmas Poem 1965” from The Dainty Monsters, an idealized moment of sexual intimacy is likened to the red lights of a Christmas tree penetrating the skin of the woman:

You are in purple
with the red of the tree
moving into your skin
like my love my love

(45)

Intensify this image of the warm, penetrating, red light of love, and you have the familiar Ondaatje image of the scar, which makes its first appearance in this collection, as well. “The Time around Scars” shifts from a woman whom the speaker has inadvertently scarred some years ago, to the speaker's wife who was accidentally scarred before he knew her, back to an imagined version of the first woman; the poet now wishes that he could amalgamate his love for his wife and his scarring of the first woman:

I would meet you now
and I would wish this scar
to have been given with
all the love
that never occurred between us.

(49)

The dominant tone is wistfulness—a desire to inscribe the scar letter of love.

There is a similar sense of performance awe in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid when Billy peers into the knife-ripped wrist of Angela in an attempt to fish out a bullet lodged inside:

look at it, I'm looking into your arm
nothing confused in there
look how clear
Yes Billy, clear

(66)

The critical reactions to this episode are revealing from the perspective of gender inquiry. J. M. Kertzer, pursuing his concern with the destructive duality of mind and body in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, sees this moment as evidence that “Mind confuses, corrupts, goes mad. The body remains simple, urgent, and ‘clear.’ When Billy digs bullets from Angela's arm, he gazes right into her body” (90). The male gaze right into the body of a woman appears more problematic for Anne Blott, dealing as she does with

the interrelation of the killers, the photographers, and the poet who catches life and fixes it on the page. … The killer Billy the Kid is a photographer, like Huffman fascinated by the look of motion frozen into form, as in his examination of Angela D's split arm.

(201)

Both this scene and “The Time around Scars” are reminiscent of Buddy Bolden's desire to penetrate the labyrinth of Nora Bass: “With the utmost curiosity and faith he learned all he could about Nora Bass, questioning her long into the night about her past. Her body a system of emotions and triggers he got lost in” (15). As Robert Kroetsch has written of his contemporaries,

The theory of answers, for us, is a dangerous one. We must resist endings, violently. … Contemporary criticism is full of our attempt to break out. Or, more exactly, to break in: that is, to penetrate. … We want to penetrate the word, penetrate the image, and uncover story.

(191)

For Ondaatje, “breaking in” is both desired and discomforting; he obviously has a great deal of admiration for the act of breaking in, as the return of the thief Caravaggio in The English Patient demonstrates. Yet Caravaggio's acts of breaking in result, as Hana observes, in his own breakage. More tellingly, the intended victim of the robbery that leads to Caravaggio's disfigurement is being penetrated by her lover as the thief slips through her room; she sees Caravaggio, but does not betray him to her lover. For all of its fascination for Ondaatje, penetration takes on, at moments, a nasty ideological aftertaste. Small wonder that, in his poem for his daughter in Secular Love, “To a Sad Daughter,” the poet advises her, “If you break / break going out not in” (97).

In recent Ondaatje works, there is a growing suspicion of the pen-penis equation, of storytelling as a male art. And yet, critics describing Ondaatje's artist figures favour the penis metaphor. Consider, for example, Dennis Cooley's description of Billy and Buddy: “Throughout Billy the Kid and Slaughter (especially in their climaxes) their tortured art orgasmically explodes ‘out there’—in the hot, open spaces beyond the provisional edges where they constantly find themselves” (211). Female listeners or companions of these artists are, as we've seen in the image of Angela's split wrist, penetrated by these artists. There is also Buddy Bolden's wild desire to penetrate the mysterious woman he imagines is dancing to his music during his last parade, or his compulsion to plunge his fingers into Robin Brewitt's back while they dance, as though he were playing his cornet, “improving on Cakewalking Babies” (59). But in In the Skin of a Lion, phallic art is subjected to more questioning; Rowland Harris, the commissioner of public works, envisions the bridge he is building as a direct product of his patriarchal sway—“his first child as head of Public Works” (29). But, a moment after he forms this thought, five nuns—women who announce their choice not to be penetrated—trespass on that phallic child. And the nun who falls from the bridge—Alice—will pick up the lion's skin of storytelling and creativity.

In fact, in recent works by Ondaatje, the woman as penetrated audience or object often turns creative—and that is enough to set patriarchal bridges of all kinds crumbling. This does not occur, however, in an early poem about Queen Elizabeth 1, “Elizabeth,” wherein the queen's art is a replacement for resisting patriarchal rule. After the guillotining of her lover, Tom, Elizabeth finds “cool entertainment now / with white young Essex, and my nimble rhymes” (Dainty Monsters 69). Coming through Slaughter contains a segment entitled “Nora's Song,” but it is a lament for the absence of a male, Buddy, and it is even more private and hidden than the unrecorded music of Nora's husband: “Dragging his bone over town …” (17). Women's art, in Coming through Slaughter, seems dependent on a man's art, in more ways than one; while Buddy watches a woman, probably Robin Brewitt, slicing carrots, he translates this domestic (women's) work into a commentary on his art: “As with all skills he watches for it to fail. If she thinks what she is doing she will lose control” (31). And Nora's mother, Mrs. Bass, figuratively becomes a woman artist—the dancer Isadora Duncan—only through the male investigator Webb's deduction that the circumstances of her death were the same as Duncan's. But female emulation of Duncan takes on a more subversive cast in Running in the Family, where “Doris Gratiaen and Dorothy Clementi-Smith would perform radical dances in private, practising daily. Both women … were greatly influenced by rumours of the dancing of Isadora Duncan” (33). What's more, unlike Nora Bolden and Robin Brewitt, they soon carry their art into public performance.

But it's with In the Skin of a Lion that women artists come to the fore, as Christian Bök notes, though I read their accomplishments more positively than he does. When Clara and Alice “slip into tongues, impersonate people,” they embody women artists who have taken the exhilarating but dangerous step of “slipping into their tongues.” What's more, “Patrick is suddenly an audience,” the narrator notes in some surprise (74). Like Hana in The English Patient, the two artists continue their work after the male audience has deserted them and gone to bed; they do not exist for him. In this early hour of subversiveness, Clara and Alice take the adventurous next step of turning their former audience into an art object: “After an hour or so they say to each other, ‘Let's get him.’ … Approaching a sleeping man to see what he will reveal of himself in his portrait at this time of the night.” No wonder their shared sheet of paper “sometimes tears with the force of the crayon” (75); used to being an audience for so long, women wield even the unvalued domestic tools of art with an irrepressible energy.

The most explicit example of one such female writer in In the Skin of a Lion is Anne Wilkinson, whose journals are quoted (just as her poetry is remembered by a grown Hana in The English Patient [288]). She makes a cameo appearance in this text in the character of Anne, the writer (198; Butterfield 166). Caravaggio (who is also a central character in The English Patient), the artist of penetrating and taking, watches her deep in the act of creation, and he soon realizes that he is separated from her by more than a pane of glass. But when that difference is articulated, we see the true complexity of gender in the works of Michael Ondaatje; what Caravaggio envies in Anne is her ability to penetrate the page:

[S]he was staring into a bowl of kerosene as if seeing right through the skull of a lover.

He was anonymous, with never a stillness in his life like this woman's. … The houses in Toronto he had helped build or paint or break into were unmarked. He would never leave his name where his skill had been. He was one of those who have a fury or a sadness of only being described by someone else. A tarrer of roads, a house-builder, a painter, a thief—yet he was invisible to all around him.

(199)

Clearly, the Kroetschian artist who both builds and transgressively penetrates still has his attractions.

What Caravaggio—and, arguably, Ondaatje—does here is to take ownership of the female artist by assuming that he can enter her creativity and liken it to his own, in spite of the powerful differentiating forces of history. Indeed, Ondaatje's (re)thinking about gender turns on the crucial question of ownership, as I intimated at the beginning of this paper, and the main metaphor in which Ondaatje tries to sort out this question is, not surprisingly, that of the house. In The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Sallie Chisum moves about the house from 11 a.m. until 3 p.m., doing the jobs that her husband, John, has left on a list for her. Even her “large bones somehow tak[e] on the quietness of the house” (33); her bodily house is housed, and both legal and domestic writing decree that both houses belong to her husband. Clearly, Sallie, like Billy, longs for wilderness: “She had lived in that house fourteen years, and every year she demanded of John that she be given a pet of some strange exotic breed” (36). Still, she appears as a species of ministering angel in that house, caring for Billy as he recuperates from sunstroke and carrying out delicate domestic ceremonies.

In later Ondaatje works, we find a strikingly different portrait of males trying to move in a female house and finding it to be a disorienting—but revealing—experience. Patrick of In the Skin of a Lion whirls around a room blindfolded before Clara, whom he has instructed to keep still for his performance. But she refuses to obey and moves, just as she has refused to alter her plan to go to Ambrose Small: “She refuses all this and moves off the bed, positioning herself on the northeast corner of the rug,” holding her ears shut to “his endearments” (80). She is hit; Patrick, nose bleeding, admonishes her, “You moved. I told you not to. You moved” (81). The speaker of the prose poem “Her House” from Secular Love has, in effect, tried similar experiments. He turns, however, not to recrimination but acknowledges, and expresses his admiration for, his wife's ability to walk in her own house and skin:

On certain evenings, when I have not bothered to put on lights, I hit my knees on low bookcases where they should not be. But you shift your hip easily, habitually, around them as you pass by carrying laundry or books. When you can move through a house blindfolded it belongs to you. You are moving like blood calmly within your own body.

(87)

At the same time, the speaker acknowledges his own Patrick-like desire to locate Woman on a map of the house:

It is only recently that I am able to wake beside you and without looking, almost in a dream, put out my hand and know exactly where your shoulder or your heart will be. … And at times this has seemed to be knowledge. As if you were a blueprint of your house.

(87)

The last poem of the collection, “Escarpment,” confirms and echoes this uncertain knowledge; a male speaker and a woman walk along a riverbank, and the man tries to baptize the river with some verbal commemoration of his lover: “Heart Creek? Arm River?” (126). At the same time, he is aware that what he seeks “is not a name for a map—he knows the arguments of imperialism,” and so he rationalizes his desire by calling it “a name for them, something temporary for their vocabulary” (126). Near the end of the poem, the speaker acknowledges the woman's power to name, though he can only do so, in the words of this poem, by naming for her some flowers that botanists have already named: “He thinks of where she is, what she is naming. Near her, in the grasses, are Bladder Campion, Devil's Paintbrush, some unknown blue flowers” (126). In that last phrase, the door of patriarchal language is left open a crack for further naming and renamings, for the woman in the room of language to “refus[e] all this” and move through it. But the poem ends with the reinscription of male naming desire: “He holds onto the cedar root the way he holds her forearm” (126). That desire is a tough root, too.

What has happened here, in this poem that reproduces, in its contradictory, back-and-forth river wanderings, the very movements of gender in Ondaatje's writing that I have traced in this essay? In short, the poet-speaker “knows the arguments of imperialism,” and, at last, he has begun the painful process of applying them to gender relations. Some years earlier, Ondaatje did apply the language of gender relations to the country of his birth:

And so its name changed, as well as its shape,—Serendip, Ratnapida (“island of gems”), Taprobane, Zeloan, Zeilan, Seyllan, Ceilon, and Ceylon—the wife of many marriages, courted by invaders who stepped ashore and claimed everything with the power of their sword or bible or language.

(Running in the Family 64)

With the growing general recognition that the poet, too, participates in this courting and claiming of the powers of the linguistic sword, Michael Ondaatje has come to be a source of greater interest to critics of gender. If now he twirls about the room of his exquisite language, Bartok-like, blindfolded, he knows that he will hit the figure of a moving woman.

Works Cited

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