Michael Ondaatje's reinvention of social and cultural Myths: In the Skin of a Lion

Abstract

From the beginning of his writing career in the early sixties until the recent publication of In the Skin of a Lian (1987), the Canada of Michael Ondaatje had represented one thing: a geographical locale which he has selected as his home but which, fundamentally, had failed to engage his imagination. The fictional worlds he created in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter and Running in the Family, has been located outside of Canada, each corresponding to an actual place complete with historical and geographical references. For this very reason it has been impossible - as Sam Solecki noted in his introduction to Spider Blues, »a collection of reviews and essays on Ondaatje - to place this anomalous literary presence in Canada within »specifically Canadian tradition of writing ...«,  a tradition that would»include and see relationships among figures as different as Roberts, Pratt, F. R. Scott, Purdy and Atwood ...« Ondaatje's »characters, landscapes, stories and themes resist any taxonomies based on overtly Canadian thematics.« In fact, Solecki further suggested that Ondaatje, like »V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott and Salmon Rushdie ..., compels a rethinking of the notion of a national tradition«. Similarly, another critic from the same collection described Ondaatje's position in the context of Canadian writing as unique - a position according to which »language or audience or the identity and the role of the poet are indeterminate. «