ABSTRACT
To answer the question announced in the title, let me begin with two specific narratives: Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter and Frederick Turner’s Redemption. On the first pages of Ondaatje’s 1976 novel Coming Through Slaughter, he places two images. One is a blurry reproduction of a photograph taken at the turn of the last century. It is a picture of a New Orleans band typical for the period. This one, though, contains the only known image of Buddy Bolden, the legendary cornet player, whose virtuosity has been much admired in the memories of early New Orleans jazz musicians but never recorded. Because Bolden allegedly had a psychotic break, authorities sent him to the state asylum in Slaughter, Louisiana – where he died years later – just as the technology of recording was coming into its own. Thus, the picture introduces a paradox: a photograph of music. The other image emphasizes this synaesthetic, that is, cross-sensory paradox: it is a string of three sonographs, a scientific image of dolphins’ squawks, clicks, and whistles. Both images are underwritten by captions that act like ekphrasis, verbal descriptions of images that we are seeing. After these two images, Part 1 of the novel commences with the curious words “His geography.” These words are followed first by the creation of a scene of reading for us, the reader – “Float by in a car today and see the corner shops. … ” Then Ondaatje introduces the early twentieth-century tropes that have defined – still define – New Orleans as a place. These tropes, that is, common representations, are, for example, the prostitutes classified by race, the piano players in the brothels, and the patron of New Orleans underworld in 1900, Tom Anderson. The multifaceted opening of the form of Ondaatje’s novel implies that how we read these tropes defines “his [Bolden’s] geography.”
