Buddy Bolden Blues

There are some authors that push all my buttons – in the best possible way. Michael Ondaatje is one of them. Originally I thought I would start by talking about his latest novel Divisadero, but to me it makes more sense if I start with Coming through Slaughter (1976).

Coming through Slaughter is the story of the New Orleans cornet player Buddy Bolden. Bolden is an actual musician who is credited by some as one of the forerunners of jazz music. He played ragtime and added blues and church music, playing by ear.

I remember having a long discussion with a college professor about Ondaatje and postmodernism with me arguing that this is a postmodern book in the same sense as lot of the traditionally postmodern fiction like Auster’s New York Trilogy or the work of George Luis Borges. Ondaatje takes a real character, like Bolden, and adds and subtracts to his story, making it fictional in a different sense than what we are accustomed to, leaving the reader with a good sense of what New Orleans and the jazz scene is like and at the same time as a lot of the information given is well researched and verifiable and the crucial parts, the poetic and deeply affecting parts, are fictional. Ondaatje does the same thing in The English Patient, using the character of the desert explorer Almásy.

Coming through Slaughter is built around Buddy Bolden who was diagnosed with dementia praecox, a diagnosis that would today be schizophrenia. From what little I have gleaned of how that condition is described I would say it is reflected in the actual style of the novel as well. The chapters are short and disjointed, reflecting many voices and different styles of text – everything from dialogue to lists of song titles. Ondaatje changes perspective and point of view, writing in a first person point of view for some passages and then slipping into a more omnipresent point of view for others. The language is sometimes prosaic, sometimes lyrical and that is what lures me in every time.

I will give an example of the style:

“Travelling again. Home to nightmare.

The earth brown. Rubbing my brain against the cold window of the bus I was sent travelling my career on fire and so cruise home again now.

Come. We must go deeper with no justice and no jokes.

All my life I seemed to be a parcel on a bus. I am the famous fucker. I am the famous barber. I am the famous cornet player. Read the labels. The labels are coming home.” (Ondaatje, p.106).

The next page gives a list of the different jazz bands active during this time. I like this sort of thing, I really do. It strikes at some of the central ideas of what fiction can do and pokes subtle fun at the notion of there being any real truth in relating the actual life of someone without alterations and omissions. You can never really get at the truth anyway, despite what some authors claim. Fictionalising reality is a way of pointing out the central lie in writing, the Coleridgian “willing suspension of disbelief” and the notion of there being any authenticity in the world of words. But I digress…

Ondaatje always does his homework. He can give the reader New Orleans in 1907 or the deserts of Sahara in 1939 with great care of detail and at the same time delve into the mind and soul of the lead characters with poetic precision. And with Coming through Slaughter it doesn’t matter if you have no interest in New Orleans or jazz or music or the life of the musicians in the early 1900. There’s enough poetry, love, hate and madness in the language for it to be worth your while anyway.

Mule