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Articles

Volume 16, Number 1 (1991)

Michel Ondaatje and the Production of Myth

  • George Elliott Clarke
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1991-01-01

Abstract

Michael Ondaatje's work, from Dainty Monsters to Secular Love, chronicles the genesis of myth from structure: storytelling becomes the narration of myth. Monsters introduces Ondaatje's idea of myth as exotic, amoral, violent, dramatic, and recurrent. The production of dramatic myth achieves its greatest manifestation in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, a fictional history which shows the fatal interplay between the opposing myths represented by Billy and Pat Garnett. Ondaatje's myth-making in Rat Jelly focuses on his father and artist-characters as maze builders/web spinners. Coming Through Slaughter, the retold story of Buddy Bolden, translates reality into myth, life into art. Slaughter is a radial system of myth constructed around the photograph of Bolden, but the collage of fictions reveals Ondaatje himself. In There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do, poems transmute biography and autobiography into history and myth. In Running through the Family, his biographical novel, and Secular Love, Ondaatje affirms the spill of history through every production of myth. Ondaatje's oeuvre constitutes a mythology which dramatizes the creation and dissolution of myth.