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Notes
1Ondaatje, 32. All references, unless indicated otherwise, are to the Bloomsbury, 2004 edition. Page references will immediately follow the quoted passages.
*Part of this paper was presented at the HELAAS conference on Ex-centric Narratives, Greece, March 2007. I would like to thank Professor Hilde Staels for her unremitting support and helpful advice.
2Bök. Several critics refer to the idea of the self-destructive artist: Scobie, 6, 12, 13; Solecki, 40; Maxwell, 102; Jacobs; Lernout, 92; Jarrett, 31; Barbour.
3Solecki, 35; Heighton.
4The idea of an “art … rotted by its receptors” (Maxwell, 107) is expressed by Scobie 9, 11; Solecki, 40; Bilan, 293; Maxwell, 110; Jacobs; Heighton; Barbour; Greene, 101 – 2; Lacroix, 16.
5Siemerling, 118.
6Rooke, 273 – 4; Jacobs; Heighton; Siemerling, 121, 123; Greene, 103, 115.
7Greene, 106. See also: Scobie, 7, 12; Kertzer, 298; Rooke, 277; Jacobs; York, 113; Barbour.
8Smythe, 4. Siemerling, 130, points out that in the parade passage “differential values approach zero both on the level of content … and on the formal level of sentence and paragraph structure”. Jones, 18, refers to the “aural appeal” of the text and Heighton likens the flow of words with “a mad improvisation”. Barbour suggests that “the language begins to stretch beyond normality” and Clarke makes the comparison with “a roller coaster that jumps its tracks and smashes into a stone wall”.
9Siemerling, 14.
10Greene, 104.
11Scobie, 18; Solecki, 40; Barbour.
12Maxwell, 102.
13Kristeva, Revolution, 15.
14Ibid., 22.
15Kristeva uses “symbolic” to refer both to the structures of communicative language and to conventions within the social realm.
16Kristeva, Revolution, 86.
17Kristeva, “From One Identity,” 136.
18Kristeva, Revolution, 24.
19Oliver, xv.
25Kristeva, “Avant-Garde,” 212.
20Kristeva, Revolution, 48.
21Siemerling adopts the notion of the thetic, and opposes it to the heterological in his discussion of alterity. He does not focus on the semiotic and the symbolic.
22Kristeva, Revolution, 36.
23Ibid., 50.
24Ibid., 49.
30Kristeva, Revolution, 24.
26Heble, 31.
27Kristeva, Language, 309.
28Ibid.
29Heble, 53.
31McAfee, 51.
32Heble, 56.
33Barbour.
34Kristeva, “Avant-Garde,” 214.
35Jarrett, 27.
36“As Bolden says at one point, the room stands for the self” (Hillger, 81).
37Maxwell, 105.
38“Bolden has desperately tried to avoid freezing his music into the kind of ordered art that would belie the emotions that feed it” (Verhoeven, 190). See also Solecki, 39.
39McAfee, 63.
40Solecki, 25, suggests that the audiences do not so much alienate Bolden from his emotions, as demand that he “take greater and greater risks with his own sanity in order to produce work closer to what the audience regards as the psychological and emotional ultimate in human experience.”
41Cf. note 4.
42Barbour. See also Solecki, 39.
43Malcolm.
44Jacobs.
45See, for instance, Solecki, 38; Greene, 105 – 6.
46In the introduction, I have already indicated that other critics as well refer to the danger inherent in this kind of art. Steven Heighton rightly points out that “Bolden is afraid of [this kind of] kinetic ecstasy”, but does not elaborate on the subject by means of a theoretical framework. Solecki, 35, rightly suggests that: “To surrender himself to this kind of creativity, a complete immersion in the immediate, the momentary, means extinguishing any possibility of achieving and possessing a stable, private self.” He also seems to suggest, however, that Bolden could change “his mode of being” (Solecki, 35) if he wanted to, which is not the case. We cannot choose not to be divided and in process. Neither Heighton nor Solecki are using a specific psychoanalytic approach.
47McAfee, 51.
48White, 7.
49Siemerling, 117.
50Scobie, 13.
51“Bolden loses the image of his self, a result that is reinforced by the fact that when he fights Tom Pickett in the barber shop, the mirror gets broken” (Hillger, 83).
52White, 10.
53McAfee, 105.
54McAfee, 63.
55Verhoeven, 190.
56Hillger, 83.
57Maxwell, 112.
58Cf. note 8.
59Smythe, 5.
60Kristeva, Revolution, 86.
61Ondaatje, 131 (House of Anansi edition).
62Siemerling, 111 – 12, suggests that the “line … seems to come both from Bolden … and from a narrator.”
63Heighton.
64McAfee, 46, 48.
65Ibid., 45.
66Kristeva, Powers, 4.
67McAfee, 49 – 50.
68Kristeva, Powers, 3.
69Smith, 127.
70Kristeva, Powers, 15.
71As Scobie, 18, notes: “The ‘black room’ which Bellocq offers is of course the photographic darkroom.”
72“Bellocq has sought in certain death the certainty Bolden hates, yet even that has failed” (Barbour).
73“he frames himself with a ‘balcony’ of chairs (a margin first, but also suggesting his desire for a public, for people watching from the balcony) and so burns himself and his darkroom” (Heighton).
74Siemerling, 125.
75Hillger, 81. Although Hillger, 84, refers to one of Kristeva's key notions, “the subject in process”, Hillger does not use a Kristevan approach in her analysis of Coming Through Slaughter. Instead, she refers to Deleuze's theory of the simulacrum and “Nietzsche's distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian art” (Hillger, 87).
76Cf. note 7.
77Rooke, 272, for instance, suggests that Bolden “has also internalized [Webb]”.
78Scobie, 10; Barbour; Greene, 106.
79Scobie, 10.
80McAfee, 105.
81Siemerling, 134. According to Rooke, 272: “He cannot vomit (cannot express the feeling that pours through Bolden's horn in the parade), and so Webb ends a ruined and imprisoned man.” She does not, however, specify what feeling “pours through Bolden's horn”.
82Bök.
83McAfee, 46.
84Kristeva, “From One Identity,” 134.
85Kristeva, Revolution, 69.
86Using a different vocabulary, Solecki, 45, suggests that “the writer remains in control of his material, while [Bolden's] material overwhelms him.” Scobie, 19, as well points out that Ondaatje's art remains “controlled and considered”, unlike Bolden's.