I'm drawn to a form that can have a … cubist or mural voice to capture the variousness of things.

‘Michael Ondaatje: An Interview,’ 248

In a 1984 interview, Michael Ondaatje declared that he would ‘pick up and read anything by John Berger’ (328). Although some critics have taken note of this interest, they have not explored the dense web of intertextual reference to Berger's writing that can be discerned in Ondaatje's novel In the Skin of a Lion.¹ Yet, this text refers directly to works by Berger on a couple of occasions. One of two epigraphs is taken from Berger's novel G.: ‘Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one’ (149). Ondaatje also weaves the title of an art criticism essay by Berger into his narrative when he describes Nicholas Temelcoff building the Prince Edward Viaduct: ‘He floats at the three hinges of the crescent-shaped steel arches. These knit the bridge together. The moment of Cubism’ (34). Berger wrote an account of Cubist painting called ‘The Moment of Cubism,’ which was published in a collection of the same name (1969). Far from being incidental to In the Skin of a Lion, I will argue that these two references form the basis for considering this a Cubist novel after Berger.² For, just as G. could be said to translate Berger's perceptions about Cubist painting into novelistic form, echoing them verbally and conceptually, to the extent that G. becomes a literary Cubist work, so too does Ondaatje's narrative echo Berger's art critical and fictional interpretations of Cubism.

By categorizing In the Skin of a Lion as a Cubist novel, I do not wish to imply that such a classification provides an exhaustive description of the visual characteristics of Ondaatje's text. Rather, these Cubist qualities should been seen as part of an intense and unwavering fascination with the visual in Ondaatje's work in general and this novel in particular. For example, In the Skin of a Lion contains numerous biographical and pictorial references to the Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio, a subject to which two articles have been devoted.³ Hence, this analysis of the Cubist aspects of In the Skin of a Lion attempts to explore Ondaatje's interest in the visual from another perspective, and, in that process, to examine Ondaatje's intertextual relationship with Berger's writing.

Together with his book The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965), ‘The Moment of Cubism’ constitutes some of Berger's most trenchant and innovative art criticism. Written from a Marxist perspective, these works attempt to demystify their subjects and to situate them within a historical, social, and political context. Instead of proceeding by way of linear argument, for example, ‘The Moment of Cubism’ takes its methodological cues from Cubist painting itself: it juxtaposes blocks of material, thereby enabling Berger to mediate between different levels of experience. As I have argued at length elsewhere, Berger's novel G., which was written between 1965 and 1971, functions as both a Marxist modernist and a literary Cubist narrative.⁴ Besides drawing extensively upon Berger's art critical writings, G. also fulfils canonical definitions of literary Cubism.

Although Cubist writing is notoriously difficult to define, In the Skin of a Lion does display what Wendy Steiner sees as the two central aspects of the Cubist analogy in her book The Colors of Rhetoric (1982): stylistic parallelism and a comparison of ideologies. Steiner uses the term ‘stylistic parallelism’ to refer to ‘the matching of technical elements of painting with those in writing’ (179). She provides a list of features that is useful for comparing the stylistic aspects of painting with those of writing. This list includes: (i) a parallel between multiple perspectives and multiple points of view, which Steiner sees as leading to (ii) a fragmentation of form, and (iii) an analytical stance towards reality; (iv) self-reflexivity; (v) an ambiguity in terms of reference; and (vi) a tension between representational and non-representational figures. Steiner's phrase a ‘comparison of ideologies’ alludes to the way in which the Cubist painter's ‘aesthetic presuppositions’ can be compared with those of the Cubist writer (179). Likewise, John Berger's concept of the ‘Cubist moment’ deals with stylistic and ideological aspects of Cubism. (The originality of Berger's interpretation of the art movement lies chiefly in his discussion of the Cubist moment as an era of convergence, which I shall later outline.) Both stylistic parallels and ideological comparisons can be made between the painting Berger describes in ‘The Moment of Cubism’ and the writing in Ondaatje's novel. Despite the impossibility of distinguishing between form and content in an absolute sense, we might differentiate between them for the purpose of categorizing In the Skin of a Lion, on the understanding that such a division is an artificial one.

In ‘The Moment of Cubism,’ Berger writes of how Cubism instituted a revolutionary change in the history of art by overthrowing a concept of art that had existed for five centuries: it broke with the tradition of creating illusionistic, three-dimensional, pictorial space based on linear, one-point perspective. Instead of presenting an object as perceived from a single position in space, the Cubists presented the object as seen from multiple points of view. While Berger does not draw a direct analogy between perspective in Cubist painting and point of view in modernist (or postmodernist) writing in this essay, in another piece entitled ‘The Changing View of Man in the Portrait’ (1972), he writes:

We hear a lot about the crisis of the modern novel. What this involves, fundamentally, is a change in the mode of narration. It is scarcely any longer possible to tell a straight story sequentially unfolding in time. And that is because we are too aware of what is continually traversing the storyline laterally. …

Something similar but less direct applies to the painted portrait. We can no longer accept that the identity of a man can be adequately established by preserving and fixing what he looks like from a single viewpoint in one place.

(40)

Thus, Berger makes an indirect link between the Cubist's break with unified perspective in painting and the way the fragmented, modernist style of writing broke with nineteenth-century, classic, realist representation based on the Aristotelian tradition of unity in narrative.

This change from single to multiple points of view is alluded to in the sentence from G. that Ondaatje takes as his epigraph (‘Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one’). In the Skin of a Lion presents many stories told from multiple points of view. The novel begins with a description of Patrick Lewis's childhood and then shifts abruptly in the following chapter to an account of the building of the Prince Edward Viaduct, in which the characters of Caravaggio, Rowland Harris, Temelcoff, and the nun are introduced. These shifts in viewpoint can be seen as signalling changes in perspective, particularly since crucial sequences of events, such as the nun's falling off the bridge and being rescued by Temelcoff, are relayed by more than one person. Indeed, when Patrick discovers the extent to which his and other people's pasts are intertwined, he no longer sees his own life as ‘a single story’ but as ‘part of a mural’ (145). Ondaatje has indicated that Diego Rivera's murals were important to him when he was writing In the Skin of a Lion on account of their 360-degree form (‘Michael Ondaatje: An Interview,’ 245). Although Cubist and mural form are quite different from one another, they both possess a spatial complexity that could be said to convey ‘the variousness of things’ mentioned in the epigraph to this article.

While most of the parallels between the Cubist multi-perspectival method and multiple points of view concern the style of In the Skin of a Lion, they can be detected in the content of certain passages, as when Temelcoff's perception is altered by his encounter with the nun:

When he walks into the fresh air outside the Ohrida Lake Restaurant, on the morning after the accident on the bridge, he sees the landscape as something altered, no longer so familiar that it is invisible to him. Nicholas Temelcoff walks now seeing Parliament Street from the point of view of the woman. …

(48)

In this instance, Temelcoff's vision literally shifts to accommodate the nun's way of seeing. We are also told that Nicholas felt comfortable joking with Hana, ‘gathering her perspective’ (212).

In the Skin of a Lion's deployment of multiple points of view—or a multi-faceted narrative technique—can be likened to the faceting in analytic Cubist paintings. Patrick at one point even describes himself as ‘nothing but a prism that refracted [the other characters'] lives’ (157), and when Caravaggio watches Anne through her boathouse window, the scene is described in the following manner: ‘In this light, with all the small panes of glass around her, she was inside a diamond, mothlike on the edge of burning kerosene, caught in the centre of all the facets’ (198). I have already suggested that the fragmentation of form in Cubist painting is analogous to the breaking up of narrative unity. The indirectness with which In the Skin of a Lion is narrated shows Ondaatje's rejection of what Berger calls the straight story sequentially unfolding in time.’ Rather than being led through consecutive episodes, we are advised to ‘[m]eander’ if we wish to discern order in the plot (146). This apparent lack of order—or discontinuity—of events disrupts the novel's coherence. Our belated discovery that the nun is Alice Gull provides one clear instance of narrative continuity being fragmented. The gap of ninety-two pages between learning of Alice's death and discovering the manner in which she died provides another.

Disruptions to narrative coherence not only have a fragmenting effect but also cause us to question the novel's authority. In a Cubist painting, according to Berger, ‘the complexity of the forms and the “discontinuity” of space remind [the spectator] that his view from that place is bound to be only partial’ (‘The Moment of Cubism,’ 25). Berger further states that the two-dimensionality of a Cubist canvas ‘makes it impossible to confront the objects or forms in a Cubist work. Not only because of the multiplicity of viewpoints—so that, say, a view of a table from below is combined with a view of the table from above and from the side—but also because the forms portrayed never present themselves as a totality’ (21; italics in original). In the Skin of a Lion prevents us from interpreting events portrayed as a totality because of the high degree of indeterminacy in the novel. It is difficult, if not impossible, to establish the order of events in certain places, particularly in the last chapter, where, for example, we cannot ascertain at what point Patrick broke his arm. The omission of this detail draws our attention to a gap in the narrative. This evidence of a ‘partial view’ serves to make us focus upon the process, or medium, of representation itself. In pictorial terms, we shift our attention from the subject to the surface of the painting. An analogy can be drawn with the anti-illusionistic treatment of space in a Cubist painting. Berger writes: ‘Before and after every sortie of our imagination into the problematic spaces and through the interconnections of a Cubist painting, we find our gaze resettled on the picture surface, aware once more of two-dimensional shapes on a two-dimensional board or canvas’ (‘The Moment of Cubism,’ 21). Instead of the represented forms presenting themselves as a totality, the surface of the picture becomes the totality, ‘the origin and sum of all that one sees’ (22; italics in original).

In the Skin of a Lion employs frame-breaking devices that likewise remind us of the text's status as fictional construct. It is as if whenever we begin to immerse ourselves in the narrative, Ondaatje undercuts us with a comment that cannot quite be located, such as the inclusion of an authorial intrusion in a book from which the author is largely absent: ‘Patrick would never see the great photographs of Hine, as he would never read the letters of Joseph Conrad’ (145). Another example is provided by the following passage:

She could move like … she could sing as low as. … Why is it that I am now trying to uncover every facet of Alice's nature for myself?

He wants everything of Alice to be with him here in this room as if she is not dead.

(147-48; ellipses in original)

Here, the unprecedented, sudden shift from first to third person underlines the intrusiveness of the authorial voice. We are thereby reminded of the gulf between an illusionist world, in which a character appears to exist, and an overtly fictional world, in which the author can kill off his character in the space of one sentence.

Of course, such techniques are also self-reflexive, and In the Skin of a Lion employs self-reflexivity as another means of stressing the material, constructed nature of its narrative. The novel contains some implicitly reflexive episodes, as in the doubling between the story told during a car journey and the reader's meandering traversal of the text. Another more explicit instance is provided by Patrick's using a reading metaphor to recall aspects of life with Alice: ‘All these fragments of memory … so we can retreat from the grand story. … Those moments, those few pages in a book we can go back and forth over (148). In a related passage, Ondaatje identifies the story-within-a-story of Patrick's love affair with Alice as being separate from the main narrative: ‘He has come across a love story. This is only a love story. He does not wish for plot and all its consequences’ (160). Furthermore, the statement ‘All his life Patrick Lewis has lived beside novels’ reminds us that Patrick himself is a character within a novel (82). Such self-reflexivity serves to highlight further the narrative's status as fictional construct, and, like the gaps and ellipses, it conveys a mediated, rather than a mimetic, view of reality. By incorporating non-realist features in his writing, Ondaatje can be seen as promoting an active, critical reading of his text. Just as the Cubists left parts of some of their canvases blank, so that the observer could complete the composition her- or himself, we need to work to assemble events for them to make sense. We are therefore placed in the position of Hana, who must gather the threads of the story that Patrick narrates on their drive to Marmora. Yet, as I have suggested, Ondaatje's textual fabric is not altogether intact.

Blank sections of Cubist canvases can be compared with In the Skin of a Lion's gaps on the page. For example, in ‘The Searcher,’ we encounter the following passage:

On December 16, 1919, Ambrose Small failed to keep an appointment. A million dollars had been taken from his bank account. He had either been murdered or was missing. His body, alive or dead, was never found.

Most criminal investigations in the early part of the century were dignified and leisurely. …

(58-59)

In its blankness, the space Ondaatje leaves between paragraphs graphically conveys the mystery surrounding Small's disappearance; in its interruption of narrative continuity, it suggests the time that normally elapsed before criminal cases were pursued.

Typography itself takes on visual, iconic properties in ‘The Searcher,’ such as when peoples' claims to have discovered Small's whereabouts are recorded in a series of headings and italicized paragraphs that mimic the layout of a newspaper:

MYSTERY MAN OF NORTH RESEMBLES SMALL

—Star, May 27, 1921

Remains may be exhumed if further clues come to light.

(56)

The format of this excerpt resembles that of the ‘Aeolus’ chapter from James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), which is set in a newspaper office. In its iconic properties, the excerpt recalls the concrete poetry of B. P. (Barrie) Nichol.⁵ Ondaatje responded to Nichol's poetry in a strikingly visual manner in his film Sons of Captain Poetry (1970), by assembling sequences of signs and advertising slogans that echo the playfulness and the visual-verbal puns derived from concrete poetry's typographic experimentation. For instance, he photographs a highway sign for Barrie, Ontario, and a logo for BP gasoline. Just as the spaces on the printed page are made to tell in Ondaatje's novel, the print itself is graphically charged in a way that can be likened to the Cubists' own practice of incorporating letters, words, advertisements, and even scraps of newspapers in their collages.

Gaps in Ondaatje's narrative can be approached in yet another way. If In the Skin of a Lion's indeterminacy emphasizes the lacunae in Ondaatje's text, as I argued earlier, it also creates an ambiguity of meaning. Because the confrontation with Harris is bracketed by descriptions of Patrick falling asleep and waking up, its reality status is thrown into question. (Falling asleep is often used in novels and films to signify that what follows is a dream). To confuse matters further, some of Patrick's actions and dreams anticipate his attempted terrorism at the end of the book, making us uncertain whether the late incidents are being played, replayed, or merely imagined. In the chapter entitled ‘Remorse,’ Patrick swims towards a boat after he has detonated some explosives. We are told that ‘[s]omewhere in his past he has dreamed such a moment: a criminal swimming in darkness to a lighted ship’ (171). An episode in ‘Maritime Theatre’ repeats this process in reverse, and it is scarcely more credible than any of the dreams he recounts; it may even be a dream. In this instance, the various levels of reality that I have discerned suggest this is an ambiguous text, at least in part.

Space in a Cubist painting is highly ambiguous. According to Berger, ‘[t]he space between objects is part of the same structure as the objects themselves. The forms are simply reversed so that, say, the top of a head is a convex element and the adjacent space which it does not fill is a concave element’ (‘The Moment of Cubism,’ 23). The interchangeability of form to which Berger refers describes the kind of figure-ground ambiguity that Steiner has noted in Cubism. Steiner writes: ‘The units in cubist painting, whether in analytic or synthetic phases, were made deliberately ambiguous in their reference, as if to show the semiotic nature of painting where even what reference there is is never direct and simple’ (181). Although she cites only punning, contradiction, parody, and word play as being used to create similar ambiguities in the written text, the previously cited passages in Ondaatje's novel could be said to present multiple levels of reference in their treatment of reality.

From what I have written so far, it might appear that In the Skin of a Lion is full of fragments and fissures. However, Ondaatje's main impulse seems to be more towards connection than fragmentation and any discontinuity is offset by the thematic emphasis Ondaatje places upon communication and interaction, which I shall discuss presently. One might argue that Cubist techniques are notoriously difficult to sustain in prose, on account of their heightened spatial emphasis, and that even those novels that are widely viewed as experimental and as belonging to the literary Cubist genre, such as Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), contain much conventionally linear writing. Ondaatje proposes a similar view: ‘Technically, what's happening in the other arts is much wilder than in the novel. If something unusual happens in a novel, it still gets labelled experimental. Somehow the novel demands a comfort level of realism that is quite high. The equivalent of cubism or abstract expressionism or the subliminal and fluid cutting of film still hasn't been allowed into the novel except on the periphery’ (‘Michael Ondaatje: An Interview,’ 245). It is not surprising, therefore, that although Berger's G. can be seen as a thorough-going Cubist work, it too has many traditional, non-experimental features. But not all of Steiner's canonical literary Cubist characteristics are present in Ondaatje's writing.

In the Skin of a Lion does not contain a tension between representational and non-representational elements, in that it does not deviate as far from a mimetic view of reality as does Berger's G., gaps and indeterminacies notwithstanding. For example, there is no equivalent to the description of G.'s lovers that serve to chart the move from representation to abstraction in the visual arts, thereby introducing notions of literary abstraction into Berger's text. In their physical appearance, G.'s lovers evoke Henri Matisse's Four Bronze Nudes (1910-30), and the nudes themselves enact Matisse's progress from figuration towards abstraction in their reliefs (Simmons, 125-27). Furthermore, In the Skin of a Lion does not take an analytical or objective stance towards reality. If, for Berger in ‘The Moment of Cubism,’ ‘[t]he spirit of Cubism was objective’ (15), he eschews the vagaries of subjective prose in G. in a search for clarity and accuracy that at times results in pedantry, as when he writes: ‘I do not retrospectively exaggerate either the complexity or the density of the content of that half-second’ (330). Such ambiguity as exists in G. is deployed in a deliberate and restricted manner that is nonetheless consistent with Steiner's literary Cubism.⁶ By contrast, In the Skin of a Lion's prose is typically subjective rather than objective, and it is far more lyrical and sensuous than that of G. If Berger's analytical approach can be seen in the novel's extensive, sustained, and systematic application of Cubist principles, then In the Skin of a Lion's inconsistent use of Cubism indicates Ondaatje's more fluid approach towards writing. Yet, inconsistencies aside, In the Skin of a Lion contains enough that can be related to Cubism's stylistic features—as they are conceived of by both Berger and Steiner—for the analogy to be valid.

Although the style of Ondaatje's novel can only be called Cubist in a qualified sense, its subject matter seems to be underpinned by Berger's idiosyncratic notion of the Cubist historical moment, which extends beyond the confines of formalist art analysis to include an ideological interpretation of the painting and its period. He defines this ‘moment’ as being a period lasting from 1907 to 1914 that was full of promise for the future. In Berger's terms, it was an era of unparalleled technological innovation and social change, in which a wide range of developments converged, to change the meaning of time and space. These include the growth of imperialist and socialist political systems, the founding of modern physics and sociology, the increased use of electricity, the invention of the radio and the cinema, the deployment of mass production and mass publishing techniques, the manufacture of industrial chemicals and synthetics, and the invention of the motor car and the aeroplane. Collectively these developments embodied the revolutionary potential of the modernist era that was cancelled out by the First World War.

Berger's notion of the Cubist moment is relevant to the setting of Ondaatje's novel. It is not difficult, to see that the Prince Edward Viaduct, which was built between 1914 and 1918, belongs to this new epoch of social promise and scientific change. We are told that ‘The bridge goes up in a dream. It will link the east end with the centre of the city. It will carry traffic, water, and electricity across the Don Valley. It will carry trains that have not even been invented yet’ (26). Ondaatje also presents what might be called a ‘moment of convergence,’⁷ when he makes an indirect link between historical events and literary narration:

Official histories, news stories surrounded us daily, but the events of art reach us too late, travel languorously like messages in a bottle.

Only the best art can record the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become.

Within two years of 1066, work began on the Bayeux Tapestry, Constantin the African brought Greek medicine to the western world. The chaos and tumble of events. The first sentence of every novel should be: ‘Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town.’

(146; italics in original)

In juxtaposing statements about 1066 and the plot of the novel, Ondaatje could be said to use a literary technique analogous to the collage method of synthetic Cubist painting, in which a pictorial image is constructed out of heterogeneous materials that previously had not been combined. Indeed, the idea of convergence is conveyed as much by the meaning as by the method of this passage, for the year 1066 itself is described as a convergent moment in the history of the world.

Patrick's realization that Alice had been a nun provides another ‘moment of convergence,’ since this discovery enables him to recognize the extent to which his own life intersects with the lives of others. In narrative terms, it marks the pivotal point at which seemingly disparate episodes converge. Patrick sees Alice, Temelcoff, Clara, Ambrose, and himself as representing ‘fragments of a human order’ for whom ‘the detritus and chaos of the age was realigned’ (145). Moreover, he also calls Toronto's Union Station the ‘nexus of his life’ (209). If we were to chart Patrick's journeys diagrammatically in the novel, they would converge at this geographical point in space, since he travels through the station when he comes to the city as an immigrant, when Clara leaves him, when he sets out for the Muskokas, and when he is released from prison. Hence, In the Skin of a Lion's notions of convergence can be identified in thematic, formal, temporal, and spatial terms.

For Berger, the effect of the technological and social developments that define the Cubist historical moment was philosophically far-reaching. There was an unprecedented ‘extension through time and space of human power and knowledge’ that profoundly altered our apprehension of the world (‘The Moment of Cubism,’ 6). No longer was the world as a totality a mere abstraction, but it became realizable. This change had two consequences, in Berger's view. First, ‘man was able to extend himself indefinitely beyond the immediate: he took over the territory in space and time where God had been presumed to exist’ (7; italics in original). Second, with regard to the relation of the self to the secularized world, ‘There was no longer any essential discontinuity between the individual and the general. The invisible and the multiple no longer intervened between each individual and the world’ (8).

Concerning the first consequence, both the Prince Edward Viaduct and Nicholas Temelcoff could be said to literally take over the ‘territory in space and time’ which God was thought to occupy by spanning and charting space:

He does not really need to see things, he has charted all that space, knows the pier footings, the width of all the cross-walks in terms of seconds of movement—281 feet and 6 inches make up the central span of the bridge. … He knows the precise height he is over the river. … It does not matter if it is day or night, he could be blindfolded. Black space is time. After swinging for three seconds he puts his feet up to link with the concrete edge of the next pier He knows his position in the air as if he is mercury slipping across a map.

(35)

The novel places great emphasis on the way that Temelcoff measures space in what can be read as a process of demystification. Like Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of the Vitruvian man, which epitomizes the Renaissance humanist tradition, Temelcoff makes the universe commensurate with the proportions and movements of his own body. In so doing, he renders the unknown knowable, and, hence, he displays the materialist attitude to reality that Berger associates with the Cubist moment.

Certain other aspects of the Cubists' materialist treatment of space can be related to In the Skin of a Lion. When I discussed the ambiguity of space in a Cubist painting earlier, I referred to an interchangeability of form, in which ‘[t]he space between objects is part of the same structure as the objects themselves.’ Not only is Cubism concerned with the ‘interaction between objects,’ and with the ambiguities of concave and convex (or positive and negative space), but this idea of interjacency can be carried still further (Berger, ‘The Moment of Cubism,’ 23). Berger writes that by reducing form to geometric shapes arranged on a flat surface, the Cubists created a fragmentation of form that was offset by a continuity of structure. In Berger's terms, Cubist space does not ‘dissolve’ the surface of the picture plane, but is as solid as the objects themselves, thereby emphasizing the materiality of the canvas on which the objects are painted. Hence, space is ‘part of the continuity of the events within it. It is in itself an event, comparable with other events. It is not a mere container’ (23).

Such philosophical and pictorial characteristics can be compared with In the Skin of a Lion's treatment of space, with which the novel's themes of communication and interaction are associated. Moreover, the second consequence that Berger identifies as arising out of the technological and social developments coterminous with Cubism, in which [‘t]here was no longer any essential discontinuity between the individual and the general,’ can be related to the way Patrick aligns himself with others. Ondaatje describes Patrick as an isolated, imaginative boy who is locked within an individual self. He wants to share in the sense of community he sees existing between the men, who, by skating on the lake at night carrying flaming cattails, manage to outline and inhabit the space they occupy. He also tries to converse with damsel flies, by using his ocarina ‘to give himself a voice, something to leap with over the wall of this place’ (10). Patrick travels from the country to the city as an immigrant, because this position as outsider accords with his alienated state. We are told that he was

Born in Abashed, Ontario. What did the word mean? Something that suggested there was a terrible horizon in him beyond which he couldn't leap. Something hollow, so when alone, when not aligned with another—whether it was Ambrose or Clara or Alice—he could hear the rattle within that suggested a space between him and community. A gap of love.

(157)

The reference to ‘Abashed, Ontario’ suggests that Patrick's lack of connection could be attributed to his Anglo, colonial heritage. It is only by associating with people of other ethnic origins that Patrick is able to fill in the spaces between himself and others and to define himself within a social and cultural context. It is his love for Alice and her Macedonian community that provides him with the alignment for which he longs. Like the ‘horizon in him beyond which he couldn't leap’ and the ‘space between him and the community,’ this connection is conceived of in spatial terms.

Ondaatje describes the romantic bond between Patrick and Alice in a similarly spatialized manner:

They sit in a field. They sit in the red and yellow and gold decor of the restaurant, empty in the late afternoon but for them. Hunger and desire spiriting him across the city, onto trolley after trolley, in order to reach her arm, her neck, this Chinese restaurant, that Macedonian café, this field he is now in the centre of with her. There are country houses on the periphery so they have walked to its centre, the distant point, to be alone.

(160)

The ‘field’ can be taken as both a literal reference to geographical setting and as a figurative allusion to the spatial dimension in which the lovers exist. Indeed, there is slippage between the two. The first use of ‘field’ appears to be physical and specific to a particular place, but the subsequent listing of locations suggests that the lovers also occupy a metaphorical, geometrical space, the locations charting a cartography of desire across the city. In this second sense, the city exists for the lovers as a series of meeting points, or locations where their lines of movement intersect. When Patrick and Alice walk to the centre of the field to be alone, which is described as being ‘distant’ from the houses on its periphery, their actions once again can be seen as referring to a literal, geographical and a figurative, spatial dimension. That is, besides traversing an actual field, the lovers also redefine the relationship between centre and margin relative to their own position, or point, in space. What was once peripheral becomes central, while simultaneously remaining distant from that which is anterior to their relationship (indicated in physical terms by the country houses on the edge of the field).

Metaphors of horizon and field are also used to denote the dimensions of space in a painting, a space which, in formal terms, is charged by the interaction between objects depicted within its boundaries. Thus, in the passage cited above, ‘field’ can also be read as a pictorial reference. In a painting with an illusionistic treatment of space based on linear, one-point perspective, if the lovers were to be depicted in the centre of the spatial field, they would be located at the vanishing point, that ‘distant’ point on the horizon where orthogonals converge. But, because they change their position in space, redefining the centre in relation to wherever they themselves are located, they suggest the existence of the multiple viewpoints that are the hallmark of Cubism.

The suggestion of agency in my remarks about the lovers is significant, because it is only after Patrick chooses to align himself with another that he is able to command the space around him. He subsequently learns to take possession of and to activate his own space, as the description of Patrick in Toronto's Union Station suggests:

This cathedral-like space was the nexus of his life. He had been twenty-one when he arrived in this city. Here he watched Clara leave him, walking past that sign to the left of the ramp which said HORIZON. Look up, Clara had said when she had left him for Ambrose, you know what that stone is? He had been lost in their situation, not caring. It's Missouri Zumbro. Remember that. The floors are Tennessee marble. He looked up. …

He felt like the weight on the end of a plumb-bob hanging from the very centre of the grand rotunda, the absolute focus of the building. Slowly his vision began to swing. He turned his head to the left to the right to the left, discovering the horizon.

(209-10; italics in original)

In the context of this passage, the horizon serves as a symbol of aspiration, for it is only after Patrick has literally raised his sights that he discovers the horizon and extends his vision, in both senses of the word. Also, the horizon's infinite nature could be said to evoke the boundless possibilities which which he is confronted.

Such discussion of ideals is relevant to Union Station, since its Great hall was seen as embodying the aspirations of a people. Designed by the Montreal firm of Ross and MacDonald and by the Toronto associate architect John M. Lyle in 1913, and constructed between 1915 and 1919, this monumental building was hailed as the ‘Temple of Demos’ (Richardson, 69). It was also regarded as the symbolic gateway to metropolitan Toronto, which is how it functions for Patrick, the ‘immigrant to the city’ (53). Although the sign that says ‘HORIZON,’ to which the narrative refers, is invented, the frieze inscribed above the cornice on the walls of the Great Hall is not. This frieze records the names of the cities on the Canadian Pacific and Grand Trunk railways from east coast to west coast. Besides suggesting limitless possibilities of travel and exploration, this list of names indicates the unifying function of a station built to connect the two major transcontinental railroads, as the name Union Station implies. Thus, the frieze also, in effect, celebrates national identity. Indeed, John Lyle's architecture is known for its inclusion of nationalist, Canadian motifs within an internationalist, Beaux Arts idiom (Boddy, 11-12). In its emphasis upon grand public buildings, the Beaux Arts tradition itself bears testimony to an aspiration for beauty and an elevation above the commonplace; hence, Lyle's use of expensive materials like Missouri Zumbro and Tennessee marble. By insisting that Patrick remember the names of these stones, Clara implicitly draws their inspirational qualities to his attention.

Ondaatje continues the building analogy by comparing Patrick with a ‘plumb-bob hanging from the very centre of the grand rotunda.’ This image probably derives from specific architectural motifs; most obviously, the shape of the plumb-bob rhymes visually with that of the pendulous light fixture hanging in the same position in Union Station. The description of the plumb-bob also recalls a city archive photograph of Thomas Pomphrey,⁸ the architect of the R. C. Harris Water Filtration Plant—the other grand, Beaux Arts edifice feature in Ondaatje's novel—which was conceived in the 1920s and was initially constructed between 1932 and 1941. Taken in 1935 by Arthur Goss, this photograph shows a formally attired Pomphrey standing beneath a similar light fitting which hangs from an ocular skylight in the centre of the filtration building. With one hand placed on an elegant Art Deco clock that occupies the middle of that rotunda, Pomphrey claims the space with a proprietorial air appropriate to an architect working in the heroic, modernist tradition of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright.⁹

Of course, the notion of using a hanging object to form the symbolic and perspectival focus of a building belongs to a much older pictorial iconographic tradition, which includes Piero della Francesca's Brera Madonna (1472-74). In this painting, the Virgin is seated directly under an egg suspended on a silver cord from the centre of an apse. Not only does the egg denote her divinity, by symbolizing the immaculate conception, but it also visually directs our attention to the Madonna, who forms the architectural focus of the painting, her face constituting the point at which its orthogonals converge.¹⁰ Thus, like Patrick, she is ‘the absolute focus of the building.’

Besides recalling specific architectural motifs, the plumb-bob resonates with other images within In the Skin of a Lion's narrative. For instance, it recalls the descriptions of Nicholas Temelcoff rescuing the nun. Like the plumb-bob with which Patrick compares himself in Union Station, Temelcoff is suspended ‘in mid-air under the central arch’ of the bridge, and, when he catches her, she forms a ‘new weight’ on the end of his rope (31). Just as in narrative terms the figure of Temelcoff joins what might be called the three principal stories, or lines of action, involving Patrick, Alice, and Caravaggio, he also performs a crucial connective function in the building of the Prince Edward Viaduct: ‘He is a spinner. He links everyone. He meets them as they cling—braced by wind against the metal they are riveting of the wood sheeting they hammer into’ (34-35). Temelcoff is often portrayed as the pivotal figure in this construction, in the centre of an arch, or banging the ‘crown pin’ into position (34). As quoted at the beginning of this article, Ondaatje writes: ‘He floats at the three hinges of the crescent-shaped steel arches. These knit the bridge together. The moment of cubism' (34). The last phrase refers not only to the title of Berger's essay but also to the engineering term for the tendency of a body to rotate in space around a fixed point, which is likewise referred to as a ‘moment.’ The movement that Temelcoff's body describes in space as he rescues the nun enacts this tendency and it forms a perfect coalescence—or ‘moment of convergence’—between Ondaatje's and Berger's writing.

Notes

1. Others have remarked on Ondaatje's intertextual method. See, for example, Acheson (107) and Duffy (135).

2. This article is a revised and expanded version of a paper called ‘The Influence of John Berger's “The Moment of Cubism” on Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion,’ which I presented at the Canadian Comparative Literature Association conference in 1989.

3. See Sarris and Ingelbien.

4. These points are taken from my doctoral thesis entitled ‘John Berger's G. as a Cubist Novel’ (1994).

5. These references are not as disparate as they seem. Steiner includes Joyce's writing in her Cubist analogy (179) and she states: ‘There is no clearer working out of a cubist ideology than concrete poetry’ (197).

6. Steiner equates Cubist ambiguity with polyvalence. G. is not polyvalent in the way that, say, the ‘Penelope’ chapter from Joyce's Ulysses is, with its free-wheeling association and polysemous flow. However, G., which tends towards the metaphoric pole of linguistic expression, is polyvalent in the sense that David Lodge proposes. He claims that the central assertion that nothing is simply one thing is implicit in the very structure of metaphor (495). With their double meanings, Berger's tautologies and puns can also be viewed as polyvalent or ambiguous.

7. For Berger, the Cubist historical moment qualifies as one of those rare ‘moments of convergence’ in which ‘numerous developments enter a period of similar qualitative change, before diverging into a multiplicity of new terms’ (‘The Moment of Cubism,’ 6). In this process of convergence, two or more elements are identified with one another and merge to form a totality.

8. See Baird (22) for a reproduction of this photograph.

9. Although Pomphrey's work belongs to the Beaux Arts tradition, the portrayal of Pomphrey the man in Ondaatje's novel invokes the image of the heroic modernist architect as visionary genius.

10. As a point of interest, there is a visual resemblance between the coffered barrel vault in the Great Hall of Union Station, as seen from the west, and the vault of the apse in this painting.

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