LONG BEFORE MICHAEL ONDAATJE wrote In the Skin of a Lion or The English Patient, I read Coming through Slaughter, a reconstruction of the life of jazz legend Buddy Bolden. I was fifteen, and I wrote wry imagistic poetry a la Eliot on the Toronto subway, and I was miserable, and I wanted more than anything to have written Virginia Woolf's The Waves, read in a sustained fit of jealousy at a friend's cottage that summer. I puzzled out Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch. I became insanely impressed with Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and for a time -- until overdue library notices arrived fast and furious as hard rain -1 proudly possessed a red vinyl record of Ginsberg's nasally whine.
I was at the age where things both happened and didn't, and I had my own words for these things, too; but more often than not the words were out there, swirling around my dazed head. I wanted to be able to pull them through to the page. I wanted to know how to do it.
With Ondaatje's Coming through Slaughter, I found a short novel long on much I've cared about ever since in writing, a story told so well -- so stuffed full of the dolour and lust that both buoys and blemishes a life -- it reads like a story dying to be told. It moves. And not just through the dull engines of plot.
If in some ways a juiced-up tale of sex, drugs and, if not rock 'n roll, then at least some snot-blowing jazz, Coming through Slaughter is also a classic psychological novel, driven by the voice and character of Bolden. To portray Bolden, Ondaatje uses a pastiche structure, borrowing from conventions as diverse as the police procedural and photographic portraiture. Here are different ways of getting at the truth of a person, and Ondaatje makes this search for the truth or essence of both Bolden and the novel's unnamed narrator the journey or quest -- the story, the narrative movement -- of the novel itself. The episodic, often circular structure, in which events are sometimes presented from more than one point of view through short, abrupt sections framed by white space -- the graceful leaping elisions that suggest what is left out of the story -- enable the reader to partake in the process of the fiction of the fiction. Because we enter the process, guided by Ondaatje's shadowy narrator, we, like Bolden, come through something. We get at the bones of the thing.
If this kind of reading is a coming through something then the writing is a kind of ghosting, a moving between different worlds. In fact, the at times picaresque journey through the landscape and people surrounding Bolden -through New Orleans' Storyville district, in particular -- and the drift through Bolden's inner terrain is a journey full of shifting borders, frameworks that make and remake themselves to mirror the make-up and breakdown of Bolden's personality as he begins to slip from his social self as a dog might slip a leash.
And we go too, as if on bumper cars in a midnight midway hellishly poised somewhere between the internal and the external, for Bolden is, above all else, a character abraded by contact with the world around him, suffering from the dissonance between his private and social selves, afflicted by a terrifying awareness of the borders of personality: "All my life I seemed to be a parcel on a bus. I am the famous fucker. I am the famous barber. I am the famous comet player. Read the labels. The labels are coming home."
For attention-deficit-disorder sophisticates, connoisseurs of the flickering zones of personality and social frameworks -- for us TV and pop-culture babies -- it is the other voices, the distaff ones, that stir us most. (Although sometimes I worry we've become so noir Aileen Wuornos might be the Marilyn Monroe of our generation.)
Perhaps most interestingly for me, in Ondaatje's novel both the narrator (presumably) and Bolden the musician stand in for the writer, "always listening, listening to the wet fluid speech with no order, unfinished stories, badly told jokes that he sober as a spider perfected in silence." An obsessive riven by the dailiness of life, Bolden's a control freak swooning with life's endlessly anarchic possibilities; jazz, for him, is the matrix where formal control meets life's chaos. His is an art of edges, unsmooth, deeply complex and mysterious -- as good a vehicle as any for delineating life's rude confusions with the utmost clarity. Ondaatje's Bolden risks a lack of finesse in order to go for the dirt in the mouth, the sounds of a cracked, imperfect world.
In the end, though, what makes me really see Bolden is Ondaatje's use of language. Whether thrashingly over-the- top or spare and suggestive as a whisper -- ranging from the high to the low in diction and always studded with the concrete -- the words are the thing, so well-controlled that here, for the reader, is where the immediacy and finally the transparency of the story lies. We just go with it, witness to a sleight of hand that suggests far more than the sum of its parts. This is writing like smoke.
When I'm writing I rarely give the slightest thought to the relationship between fiction and autobiography; I don't like to think theory. I like to think that story, character -- the who is this person and what's this all about, including but not confined to all the mutant ways in which we obdurately remain wedded to our most radiant nightmares (for these endlessly fascinate) -are all I need be concerned with. These, as well as vying to use every trick in the book, every time-tested and every shot-in-the-dark technique, in order to take the reader along for the fide.
So I'm struck by how innovative Coming through Slaughter still reads. As much now as when I first read it, it's a book that makes me want to have no fear -- of being called experimental and expressionistic and plotless; of being labelled post-modern or minimalist; of being termed indecent, of simply having gone too far (get a fife!). Or of using too many big words (get a dictionary! grow a brain!) -- because to my mind, this is what writers do: they use words.
In many ways, Coming through Slaughter is a book about silence. I think each of us bears our own relationship to this cool force, to the various subtle and unsubtle dynamics that command silence; but for writers the chill is always on, perhaps humming away in another room, bland as a refrigerator. It's there, no matter what one's esthetic and however one stands on issues of the day such as race, gender -- all things that go bump in the night and thrive on our aphasic reaction -- especially now when we have the apparently burgeoning populism of the white militia movement and the sartorially challenged neo-cons both co-opting the language of representation and freedom of expression.
Shaped and framed by white spaces, Coming through Slaughter displays a knowingness of the unspeakable and how we are each freighted with the dark particulars of history, with the obscene, terrible consequences of time and place goose-stepping us from birth to death. For me, the best writing both bares and braves these spaces and gaps, the jackhammer stutter tearing the throat, the broody silences at the margins of the page. The best writing shows our hunger to fill these margins, to write a kind of high aleatoric in which we recognize our lives as one slow or fast coupling and uncoupling with history. A writing in which the words really mean something -- they mean our lives.
