‘He had Pushed his Imagination into Buddy's Brain’, or, How to Escape History in Coming Through Slaughter

Abstract

This aricle proposes a revision of ideas about postmodern historical fiction through a detailed analysis of Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter. While postmodern fiction has sometimes been understood to entail a radical rejection of history, it has in fact been generally reformist in approach. These novels have focused on articulating the imbrication of historiography in narrative practices while remaining remarkably invested in producing accurate representations of the past. When postmodern historical fiction does reject history, as is the case with Coming Through Slaughter, it does so as an otology rather than as a discursive practice. Ondaatje suggests that Charles ‘Buddy’ Bolden sought to escape the isolating certainties of being within history that had accompanied his fame as a musician. The novel then frames itself as a response to the posthumous threat faced by Bolden as jazz histories are being constructed. I argue that Ondaatje's imperious and ethically questionable identification with Bolden is transvalued by the text as an act of posthumous aesthetic rescue from historicity itself. I close by suggesting that the conflation of radically disparate histories also occurs under the auspices of concepts of traumatic and sublime history among contemporary theorists. All pose serious ethical dangers insofar as they erase the historical and personal specificity of suffering.

Keywords:

• History
• Historical fiction
• Biography
• Ondaatje
• Postmodernism

Notes

Any discussion of contemporary historical fiction is caught in the same difficulty that comes with contemporary fiction more generally: there is no agreed-upon set of texts. Or rather, there are a number of broadly agreed-upon sets of texts depending on the micro-community of readers in question, with only very few texts appearing on everyone's list. What all this means in practice, I think, is that when we talk about contemporary historical fiction ‘we’ often mean many different things. Among scholars at least, this is not necessarily a bad thing, and it seems to be partly a product of the tendency within academia for hyper-specialization, which is itself a form of the very niche marketing that generates micro-audiences in the general reading public.

For the critique, see esp. Mohanty 1997; Mohanty and Alexander 1997.

Within literary critsism, the early work of feminist criticism attests to this nicely, isofar as the establishment of a counter-canon of women authors was seen as a priority. Along similar lines, much ground-breaking work in African-American literary history entailed the excavation of forgotten African-American authors.

Ondaatje does not distinguish invented interviews of real people from those that are listed among the permissions on the title page. The only clear distinction is the use of single quotation marks around what are probably the real interviews. But all interviews are introduced with the name of the speaker in italics at the top of the page. In the case of the passage cited above, we can tell the passage is invented because although Willie Cornish was a band-mate of Bolden's, Webb and the Brewitts are invented characters.

While I will not be describing Ondaatje's strategy in terms of Austin's idea of the performative, his texts activates a distinction between language that enacts and that which merely represents. For an important take on the place of the performative in contemporary fictional and critical texts bout history, see Michaels 1996.

While, as Ruth Leys has pointed out, Caruth seems to believe that traumatic repetitions entails the literal reproduction of the original but absent trauma, Felman's theory hinges upon the continued absence and abstraction of the original trauma in order for the traumatic testimony to be properly performative.

Dominick LaCapra, in his much more subtle and ethnically sensitive study of trauma as a concept within historical studies, is none the less too quick to minimize the problem. He says of trauma: ‘At times it has even become an obsession for rash amalgamations or conflations (for example, in the idea that everyone in the post-Holocaust context is a survivor)’ (LaCapra 2001, p. x).