Michael Ondaatje
Coming through Slaughter, 1976
Michael Ondaatje
 Metafictional Biography
A genre shift has been taking place in recent fiction:
writers are appropriating and transforming a form
long considered subliterary: the fiction biography.
 The new fiction biography creates a context in which
two sorts of facts are indistinguishable, serving both
the stimulative function of the truth and the symbolic and
evocative functions of fiction.
Fact an fiction must be seamless, or at least
simultaneous.
Michael Ondaatje
Typically, the fiction biography is limited to a crucial
year or few years, and thus may expand into realms
where few facts will be available: the daily life, the
inner life, the unrecorded experience of the self.
 The fiction biographer also abandons the traditional
biographical point of view –that of the omniscient
narrator- in favor of a multiple narrators or an
intimate first person, either of which simultaneously
reduces literal belief and increases psychological
intensity.
The fiction biographer is careful to establish both the
factual basis for the account and its fictionality.
Michael Ondaatje
Writers who have chosen an obscure subject, as it is this
case, tend to establish factuality by including pictures,
documents, or explanatory prefaces.
Such procedures are, of course, unnecessary with a
well-known subject.
 Ondaatje had very little to work with: a single
photograph of Bolden’s band in 1905, a single pages
of facts, and this full of question marks.
Coming Through Slaughter tells very little about
Bolden except that he existed.
Michael Ondaatje
 However, we learn a great deal about Ondaatje’s
version of Buddy Bolden, which, in fact, contradicts
the historical record as well as adds to it.
 Ondaatje describes the book as “a totally mental
landscape […] a language of names and rumors.
Somebody tells you a rumor and that becomes a
truth, not the truth. It is one of several possible truths,
each of which must be at least partially false”.
Michael Ondaatje
 The Historical Facts
 The historical Buddy Bolden was born in 1877 in New
Orleans and spent his youth there.
He learned to play the trumpet around 1894 and became
the first of the “kings” of the trumpet in jazz, leading
a highly successful career between 1900 and 1905.
 At about this time, the odd little photographer, E.J.
Bellocq was taking his portraits of the Storyville
prostitutes, though there is nor reason to believe the two
men ever met.
Michael Ondaatje
 Ondaatje’s novel begins in the spring of 1906, with
occasional flashback to Bolden’s life as a barber and
editor of the scandal sheet The Cricket.
Police detective Webb (a fictional character), a friend of
Bolden, learns from Nora (his wife) that he has been
missing for six months and sets out to find him (p. 13)
 For all its inventions, the novel clearly and
immediately establishes that it deals with a real
person.
Michael Ondaatje
 Documents
 First of all, let us keep in mind that both history and
fictions are rhetorical constructs, both are stories.
Ondaatje’s text is a complex converge and tissues of
conventions taken from documentary history and
fiction:
Interviews, milieu sketches, chronologies,
photographs, acknowledgments, archives, recordings,
legal documents, etc.
Michael Ondaatje
 In a sense these documents are irrelevant in terms of
the biographical ‘truth’, since he sabotages his
supposedly primary objective: a biography of Bolden,
that is to tell the world about him and his context.
So what this documents allow as to see, is that at the
end there is no Bolden but only his construction, the
construction of a great jazz player that never recorded
anything.
 And the distribution of these documents produces a
rhizomatic structure, that is, an structure not
connected, but fragmented, in its various parts. P.37
Michael Ondaatje
 The Points of View
 The points of view continually catch the reader offguard: these include:
an omniscient-author offering historical background;
externalized descriptions of characters such as
Bellocq;
Budy Bolden sometimes in third person and
sometimes in first person;
detective Webb, in third person;
Michael Ondaatje
the various first person voices of the interviewed
musicians;

 and finally, most startling, the author speaking with
his own voice, describing himself confronting the
“desert of facts” 134 that is Bolden’s life, the
elusiveness of the man, the “complete absence of him”
from those places he frequented, p.133
and then the author’s own identification with him:
“When he went mad he was the same age as I am now”.
(pp. 133).
Michael Ondaatje
Purely invented sections are told in the most strongly
assertive form: “I did, I thought, I felt.”
When first reading the text, one feels these shifts into
first person only because of the increase intensity
they bring.
Michael Ondaatje
But at the end of the book, one is forced to rethink all
those passages, for the last paragraph of the text is
one which the “I” could be either Bolden or Ondaatje
(p. 160).
Twenty or so pages earlier (134-135) Ondaatje had
emphasized the connections of age and emotion
between Bolden and himself.
Here the setting suggests that Bolden is in an asylum,
as do certain images associated with Bolden throughout
the novel.
Michael Ondaatje
But the tone is more lucid than the Bolden of the last
previous first-person section “laughing in my room”
(p. 142).
 This confusion of author and subject, coming at the
end of the book, cast much doubt even pertaining to
fictional account of Buddy Bolden’s life, for many of
the first person experiences attributed to Bolden are
anonymous enough, unconnected enough to the specifics
of his career, his friends or his family, that they could
as easily be read as “personal pieces” of Ondaatje
himself.
Michael Ondaatje
 Coming through slaughter is a metafictional
biography subverting its own sources.
The metafictional involvement of the author in the
construction of the text is typical of the postmodern
novel.
The author’s involvement becomes clear toward the
end of the novel: Why did my … clutch myself? 135
Michael Ondaatje
 Setting
The book has no period flavor, at least not in its
fictional sections: items of furniture, of clothing, of
architecture, are simply chairs, shirts, cottages.
Even in a case like this, where the details were so few,
it was necessary to select, to focus upon limited bits of
the legend.
Michael Ondaatje
A different writer might have concentrated in
Bolden’s legendary popularity with women;
another might have described the conflict between
Bolden and his less unconventional wife, who
eventually left him as a result of his erratic
behaviour;
another might have examined the madness itself.
Michael Ondaatje
 Biomythography
 ‘Biomythography’ as a replacement term becomes
more readily acceptable in view of life-stories in which
an author’s subject was taken from the realm of the
legendary, as is the case in Coming through slaughter. 4
Michael Ondaatje
The same process is observable half a century later,
when the initial ‘Golden era’ of Jazz – that is, the
period from about 1900 to 1925 – had passed unnoticed
by history writers, and subsequently became the focus
of attention only in the late 1930s, when several of the
important and illustrious figures on the early period
– Bolden, but also Bix, Beiderbecke, Fredie Keppard,
King Oliver, Frank Teschemaker – were already
dead, and the process of myth-making had set in.
Michael Ondaatje
 Ondaatje acknowledges the sources he worked from.
In the case of Buddy Bolden’s story, the main source of
what Ondaatje somewhat misleadingly calls “historical
information” was Jazzmen, a book published in 1939
by Frederic Ramsey jr. and Stephen Smith.
Ramsey and Smith basically collected a number of
myths and stories at large about Bolden and the other
early jazzers and provided a degree of factuality to
these rumours and tales by turning them into printed
form.
Michael Ondaatje
 There is another important book in this context:
Donald Marquis researched the life of the legendary
New Orleans cornetists for more than a decade, and
presented only the ascertainable facts in his 1978 book
In Search of Buddy Bolden.
The Bolden stories in Jazzmen only cover some 15
pages (3-18), but all the biomythical legends that have
since reappeared in bits and pieces in different books on
jazz history are there, except for the one rumor that
Bolden did return to New Orleans at some time after
he was committed to an insane asylum in 1907.
Michael Ondaatje
 Donald Marquis is able to deflate this story, and his
findings also include the fact that Bolden did not run a
barbershop (a claim that Ondaatje does not make), that
he did not edit a scandal sheet called The Cricket, and
that he did not – and this is crucial for Ondaatje’s plot –
go berserk during a parade.
Bolden’s deterioration was slow but progressive, as
Marquis describes it, and he was taken into custody
several times before he was interned for good.
Jazzmen reports Bolden’s sudden fit of madness,
however it was one of the Bolden’s band member who
suffered a stroke during a parade and had to be
hospitalised: Cornished suffered a stroke.
Michael Ondaatje
 Ondaatje chooses to reshuffle the different truths to
find a new meaning, in Coming through Slaughter it is
Cornish who catches Bolden as he falls after the artistic
climax.
Michael Ondaatje
 Jazz and writing
It is not difficult to see the recurring patterns of
narrations as representing the themes of an actual jazz
piece, the kind of music Bolden played and tried to grasp
into his understanding.
From this point of view Coming through slaughter takes
on qualities of the jazz novel differing of course widely
from texts that have been labelled the same such as
Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo or Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man, but the link is there.
Michael Ondaatje
Ondaatje’s text is not about jazz but a real jazz novel
in terms of its structure and ‘themes’ (tunes).
It performs
John Gennari states in Jazz Criticism: Its Development
and Ideologies, that jazz’s emphasis on the process of
its own creation, the reciprocity of its means and its
ends, epitomizes one of the dominant achievements of
modernism.
Jazz improvisation is virtually a state of continuous
becoming, like the processural art of Jackson Pollock’s
action painting experiments.
Michael Ondaatje
 In would like to suggest that Coming through Slaughter
has several endings, endings which I find very hard
to reconcile and which perhaps should not be reconciled.
The collage of different texts forms at the end retains
the ideal of Bolden’s music before coming through
slaughter.
Michael Ondaatje
In the endings Ondaatje fades out Bolden with a
series of interview bits, acknowledgements, and a
repetition of the photographic ending.
 The interactions between past and present,
biography and autobiography, historical documents
and rhetorics, define the very nature of Ondaatje’s
‘biographical fictions’ and his own view of historical
truth.
For Ondaatje, the historical truth of his biographical
fictions resides in allusion and metaphor, not in a
bare concatenation of facts. end