The Art of Dis-Appearance: Border Crossing in Michael Ondaatje's Fictions

• Main Authors: Shou-Nan Hsu, 許綬南
• Other Authors: Rufus Cook
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2005
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/2v5mm5

博士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系碩博士班 === 93 === 　　For Gilles Deleuze, the real consists of the virtual and the actual. The virtual is pre-representational and constantly changing. The process by which the virtual becomes static representation is actualization. When I talk of Ondaatje’s art of dis-appearance, I mean that his characters learn to escape from capitalist subjectification and objectification, to make the virtual eclipsed by representation appear, and to reshape reality so that escape becomes unnecessary. In the six fictions by Ondaatje there is a progress in the author’s learning following this order. 　　In The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Coming Through Slaughter, the heroes want to escape from capitalist subjectification. They take spatial flights. Because they do not go beyond their perception of reality through representation, they do not successfully explore the possibility of the virtual even though they have sensed the inability of representation to represent reality through their experience of animality. We have the first successful escapees from capitalist subjectification in Running in the Family. The narrator and his aunt, Lalla, are both able to transcend representation. Through the narrator’s connection to his relatives in Sri Lanka, we see that the author has found a way to meet the problem of lonely escapees in the two earlier fictions. Through storytelling we see that the author has found better materials than represented facts for him to approach the virtual. In the Skin of a Lion shows more concretely how a change of one’s habitual way of perceiving reality can help one approach the pre-representational. It also foregrounds the necessity of reshaping society. The English Patient shows us different ways to escape from identity and demonstrates through the patient’s traveling beyond represented space and time that our author has mastered the art of dis-appearance. The patient claims his belief in the communal body. This concept of the communal body is taken up again in Anil’s Ghost, which is mainly a study of how one can reshape society so that the Sri Lankan war, run by capitalists, can be stopped. 　　In the Conclusion part, I discuss the connection between love and the art of dis-appearance, the connection between the art of dis-appearance and the art of life, and I see Ondaatje’s readers as learners of the art of dis-appearance.