Racialized rooms and technologies of stardom in Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter

Abstract

Drawing on recent theories of race from critical race theory, this article examines Michael Ondaatje’s 1976 novel Coming Through Slaughter to assess the involvement, or lack, of technologies of stardom such as photography and radio in the celebrity of the fictionalized jazz musician Charles “Buddy” Bolden. This essay builds on established postcolonial and aesthetic readings, and offers an alternative to the often-held view that Ondaatje is not concerned by race, or the suggestion that he is only preoccupied by art and artists. Its textual focus is an interpretation of the counterfactual (put differently, anachronistic) scene involving a radio and scenes related to the darkroom and the racial significance of its black and white negatives. It argues that these technologies “colour” the rooms in which they are found and thereby complicate ideas of domestic privacy and opposing publicity.

Near the end of Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter (1976), the narrator bleakly remarks upon “the twentieth century game of fame” (1998: 136), ¹ a motif so important that Lorraine York calls the novel “Ondaatje’s definitive treatment of fame the destroyer” (2007: 140). But what does it destroy? One answer, perhaps the easy one, is the sanity of the fictionalized historical musician Charles “Buddy” Bolden when he goes “berserk” (135) improvising on his horn in a parade. Critics usually attribute this outcome to Buddy’s obsessive need to be spontaneous in his jazz music. He thereby realizes the “singularity” (Spinks, 2008: 62; 2009: 81) of innovative, freeing experiences sought by players of free jazz and postmodernist writers alike. The enduring focus on the modernist and postmodernist aesthetics and historiographic metafiction of Coming Through Slaughter (see, for examples, Bachner, 2005; Diebschlag, 2016; Hochbruck, 1994; Maxwell, 1985; Solecki, 1985; Verhoeven, 1994) has helped readers understand how to situate Ondaatje in the development of experimental writing in English since his first books appeared in the 1960s. Although some studies claim that in this novel Ondaatje “misrepresent[s] black history” (Mukherjee, 1994: 101), some newer historicized interpretations have also appeared, locating in the settings an awareness of turn-of-the-century socio-economics that Ondaatje otherwise does not often reveal directly in this novel (Deshaye, 2008: 474, 481). Unfortunately, historicism and the normalcy of postmodernist interpretations also obscure some of the strangeness of this book, including its counterfactual and counter-intuitive representations of technology’s involvement in Buddy’s stardom. Providing evidence for the recent claims that race may be understood as a technology, and that “race is used to construct connections between — and indeed construct the very concepts of — public and private, outside and inside” (Chun, 2009: 8, 9), Ondaatje places technologies of stardom such as photography and radio in emphatically private locations in this novel, specifically its darkroom and symbolically coloured rooms; he thereby “publicizes” these locations, racializes privacy and publicity, and inverts some of the theoretical colourings of these highly variable concepts.

There is an understated moral lesson in projecting concepts of race onto something other than bodies, but the racialization of rooms as black and white (and grey in the end) is an obviously political tactic. Although the novel’s colourings function politically by aestheticizing race, Ondaatje is also implying that one’s surroundings contain the ideological imperatives that define people in racial terms and thereby delimit their power and affect how they are understood and understand themselves. Geographers and other readers of space have applied critical race theory to show that “various processes of inclusion and exclusion, enacted at multiple spatial scales, contribute to the construction of racial categories” (Veninga, 2009: 113). On the larger scale, “Coming through Slaughter uses geography as the cipher for its cryptic racial subtext; the novel prompts readers to investigate how Bolden’s identity is affected by the segregated geography of New Orleans at the time of his band’s success” (Deshaye, 2008: 474). On the smaller and more interior scale of the room, geography has less bearing, but geography can be conceived on this smaller scale: “the geographies of race we inhabit also include […] — perhaps especially — home” (Delaney, 2002: 7, emphasis in original). Partly because a room in a home can block out the geographical outside, in Coming Through Slaughter the racial subtext is marked, inside, by symbolic colour. In one case, for example, the symbolic colour is a black that symbolizes race; in another case, the colour is not real (in other words, visible) but is produced by a domesticated technology, such as radio, that serves to create race in its cultural and historical contexts. For Ondaatje, the creation of race happens at all levels, from big city streets to little rooms to bodies and to minds. Symbol and metaphor are techniques for expressing interiority — emotion, imagination, impulse. To express it with rooms is to follow his modernist predecessors and their paralleling of “interior design” and “psychic interiority” (Rosner, quoted in Stenport, 2011: 234–5). He shows that the external, public, social norms associated with race have no difficulty entering our rooms and defining aspects of our private lives and identities.

These norms enter rooms easily partly because of the increasing availability of mass media in domestic contexts, beginning, for the purposes of this essay, with the development of popular photography in the 1890s, which is coincidentally the era of Bolden’s celebrity and the brothel photography that Ondaatje’s novel describes. Eden Osucha positions the emergence of the right to privacy in those years (at least in the United States, the setting of Coming Through Slaughter) alongside the racialization of privacy as white and publicity as black — her rationale being that “racial difference was elaborated in visual culture” in the early days of popular photography so that “nonindividuating” images of non-whites contrasted with privately available portraiture of whites, which “affirmed whites’ supposedly natural endowment with capacities for ‘self-elaboration’ and also aligned white subjectivity with the very notion of self-possessive interiority” (2009: 78). Safeguarding one’s privacy was to safeguard one set of social norms — white privilege, including property — from the invading social norm of commodity racism, “an invasion that threatened to expose and ‘sell’ all individuals as African Americans had historically been exposed and sold” (Chun, 2009: 25). In Coming Through Slaughter, a novel that enigmatically refers to Buddy’s consumption of “the white privacy” (65), this invasion appears in photographs of prostitutes who — in their own “home”, the brothel — are subject to objectification and commodification that align them by analogy with black people’s experience of slavery. In this context, the darkroom and its photographic negatives in Coming Through Slaughter have an obviously racial but ambiguous message that raises questions about the novel’s other coloured rooms — which do not always fall neatly into the white/privacy and black/publicity categories — and the one other room that contains mass media technology.

This colouring helps to explain one of the more perplexing details of Ondaatje’s novel: the mysterious, seemingly anachronistic old radio in Webb’s cabin where Buddy goes to ponder his return to public life as a popular musician. Although no colour is mentioned in the descriptions of Webb’s cabin, ² the radio introduces the popular media into domestic spaces and involves it in the symbolic representation of race, which reappears in the darkroom, or black room, that the novel’s photographer Bellocq (another fictionalized historical figure) has in his home. The scalar geography of racialization mentioned above has an analogue, here, in the scalar development of technologies of stardom; as technologies such as photography and radio became cheaper and more widespread over time, they increased the potential scope of stardom, not only through the increased availability of star-making images and sounds, but also through their (related) faster reproduction and transmission. Ondaatje’s novel treats not only the radio but also celebrity anachronistically in the sense that “the twentieth century game of fame” telescopes backward from his mid-1970s fictionalized research trip to New Orleans — coincidentally just after the 1970 Museum of Modern Art show that resituated E. J. Bellocq’s turn-of-the-century work in a much more extensive culture of celebrity (Bellocq, 1996) — to the emergence of popular radio in the 1920s, and further to the popular photography of the 1890s. The anachronistic radio is the evidence to suggest that he is projecting contemporary concerns into the past to dramatize the threat of celebrity on his main character. In the context of Buddy’s celebrity, these sometimes futuristic media and their corollaries redefine some of the novel’s rooms as public spaces, sometimes by inscribing them with racial colour, and thereby enacting a meaningfully symbolic and not actual invasion — not only of the privacy of rooms but also of the subject. This process is not remarked upon in the criticism of Coming Through Slaughter, but it is very significant to Ondaatje’s understanding of the technologies of stardom that he was becoming acquainted with personally as an increasingly well-known poet, novelist, and filmmaker in the 1970s.

Remarkably, one of Ondaatje’s implied suggestions about technology is that cameras and recording technologies such as radio historically had almost no effect on Buddy’s stardom — never broadcasting him, almost never getting his image — and so the technological function has to be performed by something else. Aware of the circularity of my argument, I contend that it is race. Race itself performs the technological function of racial symbolism, acting partly as a technology of stardom in Buddy’s promotion and publicity. (To my knowledge, the historical Bolden’s celebrity was not promoted by his blackness, but later crossover artists such as Louis Armstrong and Ray Charles arguably became self-conscious about performing race with a deliberately non-threatening charisma, partly for a white audience that found such blackness appealing, however problematically.) Race is constructed, and race constructs not only its social formations but also itself. Once we create the idea that some people are unavoidably inferior to others on the basis of minimal differences related to skin colour and other manifestations of genetics, we create both the social structures that acknowledge and then reaffirm the idea, such as slavery and segregation, and the figurations that do too, such as the stereotypes of Aunt Jemima that Osucha (2009: 93–7) considers. It is a classic vicious cycle.

I do not mean to suggest that the lack of an explicit racial discourse in Coming Through Slaughter means that there is a necessary link between absent race — Arun Mukherjee claims that “Bolden’s skin colour is entirely ignored in the book” (1994: 100) — and absent technology. Instead, I mean to test connections made by theorists of race, and to inquire alongside other critics of Ondaatje who notice how he deals with race obliquely in other novels. Glen Lowry, for example, responds to concerns about Ondaatje’s downplaying of race in his work leading to In the Skin of a Lion (1987) by emphasizing the racialization of social spaces in that novel. Lowry disputes “[t]he argument that ‘race’ is only an issue in texts that deal specifically with a ‘racialized’ subject or character or conversely which articulate overt racism” (2004: 7). Instead, “‘race’ continues to have a silent function” (Lowry, 2004: 8), a function that I believe Ondaatje recognizes and identifies in Coming Through Slaughter, prefiguring his similar work with In the Skin of a Lion. He locates the function in spaces, such as rooms, and other obvious constructions, such as technologies that inscribe meaning upon those spaces. We know little about why Ondaatje would bother to minimize and defamiliarize the role of actual technologies when historical accuracy is already a minor concern of experimental novels such as Coming Through Slaughter, but these questions should be a part of knowing this book well.

To theorize into this gap, I follow recent scholarship that proposes an equivalence, however conceptually difficult, between race and technology. On the assumption that conceiving of race as constructed, often by technology, will already be familiar and acceptable to readers, I will engage this recent scholarship only insofar as to reconceptualize race as technology. In Toward a Political Philosophy of Race, Falguni A. Sheth adapts Martin Heidegger’s canonical essay on technology in trying to understand this newly realized dimension of race (2009: 21). In the introduction to Camera Obscura’s special issue on “race and/as technology”, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun remarks that, in spite of Heidegger’s deplorable association with national socialism in Germany, his existential philosophy “resonates with the historical experience of people of color” (2009: 20) — an experience in which some people have treated other people as objects (such as slaves) in parallel with the rise of tool-oriented and machine-based technology after the Enlightenment (Coleman, 2009: 190–1). Race becomes a factor in the mindset of utility that damages some concepts of the human even as existential philosophy builds up others.

Working against the utilitarian mindset, Sheth, Chun, and Beth Coleman explain race partly through arguments by analogy. For Chun, this works through simile:

Crucially, race as technology shifts the focus from the what of race to the how of race, from knowing race to doing race by emphasizing the similarities between race and technology. Indeed, race as technology is a simile that posits a comparative equality or substitutability — but not identity — between the two terms. (2009: 8, emphasis in original)

In my view, the simile of “race as technology” easily drifts to the metaphor of “race is technology”, because similes often mingle with metaphor and metaphorical thinking: we propose a simile and, through discussion, start to omit the “as” and “like” as the substitutability becomes more apparent and we suspend disbelief, or we accept the simile, too, as a figurative expression and simply concentrate on similarities rather than categorical fusion (Chiappe and Kennedy, 2001: 251). We talk about the one thing “as if it were” something else (in the subjunctive) or “as it were” (in the conditional), the verbs to be helping to metaphorize the simile of “as”. Thus, Sheth’s language of simile is blended with metaphor:

In this picture [of race as “a way of organizing and managing populations in order to attain certain societal goals, such as political coherence, social unity, and a well- functioning economy”], race is no longer descriptive, but causal: it facilitates and produces certain relationships between individuals, between groups, and between political subjects and sovereign power. The function of race, then, is similar to the function of technology. Technology, commonly considered as equipment, facilitates the production of certain “goods”. (2009: 22)

Likewise, for Coleman, race is a “levered mechanism” or “contraption” (2009: 178, 180). Although such arguments can always be objected to with oppositional analogies or dismissals of metaphorical thinking, and although these critics have a variety of analogies in mind, they all share an insistence on thinking of race creatively. ³ For Coleman and Sheth, race is a metaphoric technology; for Chun and Ondaatje, it is like technology, if not exactly a substitute. Although ancient Greek philosophical views of art and technē might lead us to associate art with technology, these writers today think of race and technology creatively to counter the other “creative” but really destructive uses of race and technology.

Unfortunately, to some extent because of Ondaatje’s focus on art, Coming Through Slaughter is often studied perfunctorily as an example of postmodernist aesthetics. The novel remains relatively neglected in the scholarship (Spinks, 2009: 79), despite its status as Ondaatje’s first novel, probably because Ondaatje gives readers so little to work with in relation to the postcolonial theories that, along with the aesthetic ones, often influence scholarly readings of his books. Postcolonial theory is partly concerned with race, but Joanne Saul and John S. Saul note that “at least one critic [probably referring to Mukherjee] has chastised Ondaatje” (2007) for not mentioning the word race in the novel. They too prefer to focus on art — in this case musical and writerly improvisation. Lee Spinks, one of the more insightful and dedicated of recent Ondaatje scholars, acknowledges the significance of Coming Through Slaughter to postcolonial studies (2009: 80) but was required to focus on other issues because his book on Ondaatje is part of a series dedicated to ensuring that global literature is not oversimplified as postcolonial (Ramachandran, 2013: 140). Sally Bachner, with “some degree of ethical revulsion” (2005: 216), appreciates Ondaatje’s emotive skill and his novel’s humane qualities but disapproves of the “anti-historicism” (2005: 205) on display when Ondaatje imagines himself as Bolden, the men being of different races. Mukherjee is much more condemning of Ondaatje, mainly because of his alleged “misuse of historical figures” (1994: 99). With some postcolonial scholars providing analysis of much of Ondaatje’s other writing, I want in the remainder of this essay to bring together a critical racial analysis with the tradition of aesthetic readings of the novel, insofar as an examination of symbolic colour is an aesthetic reading.

Critical race theory, too, has a stake in the questions of Ondaatje’s “colour-blindness”, the setting of his novel in a racially fraught New Orleans, and the writing of it in the aftermath of the civil rights movement in the USA. In the legal context from which critical race theory comes, and in response to the supposed colour-blindness of the US Constitution, Blake Emerson explains:

For the color-blind theorist, the recognition of race is inadvisable, and the use of law to ameliorate racial disparities is itself a form of racism. By contrast, critical race theorists and their intellectual heirs argue that such consciousness is a condition of the possibility of a just social order. (2013: 694)

On the one hand, Ondaatje seems colour-blind in reducing the emphasis on race, celebrating Bolden as an artist, and crediting him with vision and historical importance.

On the other, Ondaatje aestheticizes a historical experience of racism (for instance, economic segregation) — not in ways that merit serious recrimination, but in ways that complicate race. In fact he does so over and over, as any consideration of obvious markers of race would suggest. Lowry, following Smaro Kamboureli, has noted that whiteness, for example, is sometimes a symbol of race in Ondaatje’s work (2001: 169), ⁴ and in Coming Through Slaughter there is a long list of racial signifiers that have colours that pertain to American race relations — white, black, and red (instead of non-racial colours): the photographic negative that sends Buddy “back into white” (48); the white shirts that both Buddy (58) and Pickett (69) wear in rooms with mirrors that reflect and symbolically invert the colouring in much the same way as the negative does — and, parallel with the white shirts, Buddy’s red shirts and undershirts (35, 121, 127, 151), associated with the “loss of privacy” (131) of playing live and the consequential spilling of his blood (another sign of race); ⁵ the soap that Buddy lathers onto his customers at his shaving parlour — his day job — and gives him a white skin (43); the milk and cream that Robin and Buddy paint onto each other’s skin in an argument (65); the “whiteness” (64) of the white-hot flames that kill Bellocq in his home full of dark rooms; and the rooms in general, which are sometimes white (83) and sometimes black or dark (48). Although Douglas Barbour has implied that racial arguments about Coming Through Slaughter are not helpful because everyone in the novel is at least symbolically black (1993: 102), the preponderance of white is perhaps intended to raise awareness of a racial subjectivity that white people are often “taught not to be aware of” (Carter, 1997: 199), in contrast with the experience of growing up non-white. Even as he raises this awareness, however, Ondaatje is also blurring the colour lines. The painterly superimposition, blending, or inversion of colour in some of these examples aligns with Neluka Silva’s view of Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (1982): “Ondaatje self-consciously emphasizes ‘mixedness’ throughout the text and reveals his resistance towards facile attempts at classification; and this does not only apply to issues of race” (2002: 71). It applies also to space and to the porous boundaries of public and private examples.

In Coming Through Slaughter, the public spaces are where Buddy performs, such as the parade routes throughout New Orleans, but its private spaces are more numerous. There are the Storyvilles, the historic vice districts of the city where Buddy roams alone, and there is the asylum at Jackson (not far from Slaughter, Louisiana) where Buddy is eventually committed. More often, the spaces are associated with his friends: the photographer Bellocq has his darkroom, the police detective Webb has his cottage, and Buddy’s mistress Robin and her husband Jaelin have their house. In each of these spaces, Buddy has to cope with his conflicted feelings about his status as a star, and arguably about his status as a black celebrity.

Although Buddy is a celebrity and “a social dog” (52), “it was Webb who was the public figure, Bolden the side-kick” (30) — and it is the former who convinces the latter to leave Robin and go where Webb might expect him to find the radio, a symbol of publicity and stardom. Webb and Buddy seem to be roughly symmetrical (public/private), and Webb is arguably the man who redefines Buddy’s private spaces — literally through rhetoric but figuratively through technology — and influences his decision to attempt a comeback, thereby returning him to the public.

The separation between publicity and privacy begins to break down when Webb upsets Buddy’s sense of time and space, first through talk and then technology. When Webb comes to Robin’s house, Buddy says, “He came here and placed my past and future on this table like a road” (83). Webb not only makes Buddy think of time, but he also makes him think of time in spatial terms (“like a road”). He “point[s]” (86) Buddy to “Webb’s cottage on Lake Pontchartrain” (85). Having suggested that Buddy was “wasting” (80) his life by avoiding the spotlight, Webb sends him there to “train” (80) for his comeback. It seemingly becomes Buddy’s most private place: he is there for “three weeks [or] four weeks” (100) alone, reminiscing. Narrating his thoughts to Webb, he says, “I’m scared Webb, don’t think I will find one person who will be the right audience. All you’ve done is cut me in half, pointing me here. Where I don’t want these answers” (86). Alive but “cut […] in half”, he is like a body in a magic trick, and Webb is the magician who controls Buddy’s public image by controlling his body through the rhetoric of the comeback and his Derridian hostipitality [sic] (see, Webb’s use of his private space to push his agenda onto Buddy). Buddy is almost his slave — “Buddy” only a “body”.

Webb’s cottage is also the place where Buddy discovers Webb’s strange radio. Because Webb went looking for Buddy in the spring of 1906 (15) and Buddy needed “two more years” (15) before coming home, his visit to the cottage happens around 1908, many years before the mid-1920s when radio broadcasts became common and receivers became widely available. Buddy makes note of its condition: “The wiring old” (91). The presence of an old radio in 1908 is simply an anachronism, but it is also a sign of Webb’s uncanny control over Buddy’s “past and future” and over the balance of publicity and privacy in Buddy’s life. Marshall McLuhan argues that radio is experienced “with person-to-person directness that is private and intimate” (1965: 302), but that it is, actually, a public medium capable of instigating an “almost instant reversal of individualism into collectivism” (1965: 304). ⁶ Buddy has just spent two years in relative solitude trying to recover the “individualism” that his celebrity had started to distort. Because Buddy is preoccupied by nostalgia, he does not realize that Webb’s radio is conditioning him for his re-entry into the public life — a comeback that would, if successful, result in Buddy’s music playing on radio: a disembodied sound. Buddy describes the radio broadcast: “For two hours I’ve been listening. People talking about a crisis I missed that has been questionably solved. Couldn’t understand it. They were not being clear, they were not giving me the history of it all, and I didn’t know who was supposed to be the hero of the story” (91). Buddy does not know who is supposed to be “the hero of the story”, but Webb does. Uncaring about the value of privacy, Webb wants Buddy to be the same hero that he was as a star before going into hiding. Buddy is confused because “the history of it all” has not yet happened. The anachronistic radio transmits a message from the “future” that only Webb can decipher: Buddy will train for his heroic comeback, return to central New Orleans, resume his life of celebrity, and very likely be recorded for playback and broadcast (though this latter event never occurs). Webb becomes a symbol of future stardom — of parasitic managers and agents, of technological determinism (relevant until the novel’s 1970s, at least), of typecasting and the limiting of artistic growth.

If recorded, Buddy would experience a “crisis” both of disembodiment and of being stuck in a box, such as the radio — a figurative “room”. The presence of the radio from the future emphasizes the threat of Webb’s implicit bodily control over Buddy, or at least Buddy’s unconscious perception of such control. The radio thereby replicates a process of domination that Sherene H. Razack (2007/2002) describes as colonial. Following Anne McClintock, Razack explains that colonialism often involves thinking about and describing others as “pre-modern” (pre-radio, in this case), and this characterization “condemns them to anachronistic space and time” (2007/2002: 74) — a “primitive” existence in a “civilized” world. In effect, this is how Webb controls Buddy: spatially and temporally, invoking Buddy’s alienation from the modern world through a symbolically colonial technology of publicity. By sending Buddy to the cottage (a false shelter) and exposing him to the radio, Webb makes Buddy’s private rooms public. Webb’s room is symbolically both white, the colour of limelight; and black, because of the commodifying effects of the limelight. At a time when government (historically) was reducing non-white participation in the public realm through regressive electoral laws, Webb (in the fiction) offers Buddy publicity and a future.

In the novel, Buddy is unquestionably drawn to the appealingly “public” Webb, but he is also drawn to the photographer Bellocq, the person whose crippling hydrocephaly makes him an outcast and especially private character. Bellocq likes Buddy because “[h]e didn’t treat you like a crip or anything” (47), and Buddy appreciates Bellocq for not fawning over him as fans do. “You don’t think much of this music do you?” asks Buddy. “Not yet” (88), says Bellocq. Buddy remarks,

[Bellocq was] watching me waste myself and wanting me to step back into my body as if into a black room and stumble against whatever was there. Unable then to be watched by others. More and more I said he was wrong and more and more I spent whole evenings with him. (88, emphasis added)

Buddy seems to think that Bellocq, in opposition to Webb, appraises a life of celebrity as a “waste”. Bellocq’s point of view is disturbing because it dismisses the importance of Buddy’s music, but it is appealing because it proposes that in blackness — in a “black room” undoubtedly related to Bellocq’s darkroom — Buddy could recover his privacy.

Bellocq’s black or dark room initially seems to be the exact opposite of the novel’s white room (about which I can write here only in passing), but it raises similar questions about race in relation to how Buddy is known. The black room is tentatively (“as if”) associated with Buddy’s “body” and possibly his skin colour, but it is also the place where he develops film negatives and makes photographs. Significantly, the darkroom seems to be in Bellocq’s home. Webb goes to wait for Bellocq and breaks into a nondescript room where Bellocq returns so late at night — probably not a commercial studio but instead a personal dwelling. In an obscurely funny twist on the film noir cliché of waiting in the dark to surprise someone who comes home alone, Webb falls asleep while waiting at Bellocq’s, and Bellocq surprises him — awakening him in “the darkness” of “around two in the morning” (46) — his domestic space an inverted synecdoche of his darkroom. Darkness and blackness are associated here with privacy and the private life, away from publicity, not with commodity racism.

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes states that “[t]he ‘private life’ is nothing but that zone of space, of time, where I am not an image, an object” (1981: 15). And yet, when Webb convinces Bellocq to develop an image of Buddy and his band to help in the search for him, the narrator describes the process of betraying privacy as Bellocq and Webb make Buddy into an image:

Watching their friend float into the page smiling at them, the friend who in reality had reversed the process and gone back into white, who in this bad film seemed to have already half-receded with that smile which may not have been a smile at all, which may have been his mad dignity. (48)

The narrator professes to know “reality”, seems to assume that reality is a situation prior (or alternative) to the replication of images, and implies that Bellocq and Webb know Buddy only as an image, as a seemingly happy (“smiling”) black man. According to the narrator, “reality” relates to going “back into white”: reversing the “process” of becoming an image, but also reverting to a film negative or an opposite. The historical Bolden was black, and his photo appears in the editions of the novel that I have seen, but the scene in the darkroom suggests that Buddy is whitened by the process of photography, one of the arts and technologies that support celebrity, just as the aforementioned “brand names” might have whitened the traditionally black neighbourhoods of New Orleans. The process of developing Buddy in the darkroom is also an acknowledgement that Charles “Buddy” Bolden is known to Ondaatje primarily through a legend based in part on a single image and on mere celebrity; thus, Buddy is not really known, and Ondaatje ultimately undermines the narrator’s assumptions about the “reality” of Buddy’s feelings or identity by deconstructing the “reality” of race.

The darkroom in Coming Through Slaughter is therefore a site of potential transgression, regardless of its role in exposing Buddy to the public. The darkroom defies conventions of identity based on race, but it is also the site of significant betrayals. It is the place where Bellocq gives the photograph of Buddy to Webb, thereby removing Buddy from a potentially wholesome privacy and making his self-destructive comeback possible. The transgressions in the darkroom contravene not only social codes, but also personal trust.

Bellocq is not the only character in the novel to take advantage of Buddy, but he is the only one whom Buddy eventually seems to blame for promising relief from stardom while delivering something altogether different. Because Bellocq is the only historically white character in the novel (Barbour, 1993: 101) — though he is described, in terms that evoke both the whiteness of the sun and the blackness of shade, as “a small noon shadow” (89) — one of the few generalizations I can make about Ondaatje’s opinion of whiteness in Coming Through Slaughter is that it is related to broken promises. Webb — black but whitened as a representative of the law that limited the freedoms of black people at the time of the novel’s narrative — stood for the public and made no excuses about what he wanted for Buddy. In contrast, according to Buddy, Bellocq “tempted” (89) him and “decei[ved]” (89) him with a hope of privacy. Buddy says, “He had tempted me out of the world of audiences where I had tried to catch everything thrown at me. He offered mole comfort, mole deceit” (89). For Buddy, escaping “audiences” means going underground, into “mole” territory and into darkness, which harbours a reassuring “comfort”. Webb found him because Bellocq supplied a photograph of him (in conjunction with a tip from Crawley on p. 28), so Buddy realizes that the darkness also harbours a threat of “deceit” that he might not have noticed when he was spending time with Bellocq.

Indeed, Buddy is remarkably naïve about Bellocq’s potentially exploitative uses of photography. Why does Buddy introduce Bellocq to the prostitutes and convince them to pose for him (especially when his future wife Nora is among them and is the first he convinces)? One answer is that Buddy might have thought he could help Bellocq by introducing him to “whores”. Bellocq, naïve but for other reasons, assumes that the women at the brothel “let [Buddy] in” because he was “famous” (47) and, of course, simply because “[h]e used to screw a lot” (47). Bellocq “thought his friend to be […] patronising” (61) — a legitimate complaint if Buddy assumed that Bellocq’s disability made him not only unwanted as a sexual partner but also made him “a harmless man” (125). Perhaps neither of them understood that photography was Bellocq’s way of exercising power over his subjects by subordinating their images as surrogate victims of his seemingly unconscious desire to inflict sexual violence. What I am suggesting appears in the narrator’s description of Bellocq’s procedure for getting a satisfactory image:

One snap to quickly catch her scorning him and then waiting, waiting for minutes so she would become self-conscious towards him and the camera and her status, embarrassed at just her naked arms and neck and remembers for the first time in a long while the roads she imagined she could take as a child. And he photographed that. (50)

As she forgets the presence of the camera while she is remembering her childhood, Bellocq gets the image he wants. He captures her nostalgia and child-like vulnerability. He captures her privacy, her private body. ⁷ By later marring his photographs with “knife slashes across the bodies” (51) while leaving the actual women otherwise unharmed, he reveals a desire that he can satisfy only through sublimation. Again, Ondaatje reverses typical expectations about racial identity by making the only historically white character into the most marginalized and therefore the most symbolically black of his characters. Furthermore, whereas Buddy attacks Pickett with a razor (an appropriate actual weapon, given that celebrity is “a razor in the body” in his 1973 poem “Heron Rex” in Rat Jelly), Bellocq’s camera is a symbolic weapon that lets him vent his frustration without actually attacking anyone.

Bellocq’s violence against women is not “real” in the sense of being directed at people’s bodies rather than at images of people’s bodies, but, in different ways, both his photography and the influence of his privacy lead Buddy to real harm. Perhaps Bellocq’s redefinition of Buddy through the image and Webb’s temporalization of him through radio are inherently and existentially violent, such that Buddy becomes a Heideggerian “ontotechnological” being — someone finally existing in all dimensions in relation to technology. ⁸ What harm could be more real? That the harm is both symbolic and real might be one of Bellocq’s final realizations in Coming Through Slaughter. He kills himself before Buddy goes crazy, so he never becomes aware of Buddy’s final parade and his subsequent imprisonment in the asylum; however, Bellocq eventually becomes “[a]ware” that he was “the patronising one” because he “tempted” Buddy into making a “fetish” of “mystic privacy” (61). Buddy had been “enviably public” (61) until then. Although nowhere does the novel explicitly claim that Bellocq was also aware that giving his photograph of Buddy to Webb might harm its subject, its association with the slashed photographs of the prostitutes is significant. Ondaatje seems to be suggesting that Bellocq’s photography had helped to feminize Buddy by objectifying him through an unconsciously sexual, masculine, and violent gaze. The connection between the photographs suggests an additional possibility: Bellocq might have realized that, just as he exposes the privacy of his female models, he exposes Buddy to Webb and makes him vulnerable to the “knife slashes” (or razor slashes) of the public life. If he reaches this awareness, it is through his sympathy for Buddy, not for the women he has objectified.

The exact motive for Bellocq’s suicide remains ambiguous, but his ironically performative death implies that he intuitively knew Buddy would be destroyed by returning out of privacy to a life of celebrity. He chooses to start the fire in his room from halfway up the walls, lining chairs around the room so that he can reach that higher mark. The surrounding chairs make the room seem to have “a balcony running all the way around it” (64); in effect, he creates for himself a theatre, though it is empty except for him. Although he does not seem to be in his darkroom, he is probably in the room that Webb found him in, which was also dark (46). He dies in a dark room made suddenly bright. The fire traps him in the sudden “whiteness” (64) of the room, ⁹ and “he crashes finally into the wall, only there is no wall any more only a fire curtain and he disappears into and through it” (64). The curtain, too, is a sign of the theatre. Like the window that Buddy broke without putting his hand through (10) and the window that he asked Webb to put his hands through (89), the curtain of fire represents the “edge” that separates publicity and the total experience of privacy that is death; Buddy delays his crossing of this boundary, but Bellocq hastens to breach it. In effect, Bellocq’s death is the curtain call after the performance of his lifetime. Ironically, Bellocq was never a star — a fact that implies, perhaps, that Ondaatje is not seriously warning anyone about the fatal effects of celebrity, or that he thinks the people who serve (however unwittingly) as “stage managers” for exploited celebrities might deserve poetic justice, such as Bellocq’s fate.

Bright light then darkness — these consecutive phases become simultaneous when the narrator of the novel, an autobiographical figure, acknowledges that he sees himself in the historical Bolden but also understands their separation:

I sit with this room. With the grey walls that darken into corner. And one window with teeth in it. Sit so still that you can hear your hair rustle in your shirt. Look away from the window when clouds and other things go by. Thirty-one years old. There are no prizes. (160)

Emerging from these last sentences are some very mixed feelings: grief, because Bolden’s life ended tragically; regret, because Ondaatje had not lived through the same exciting stardom (or at least not to the same degree, at that time); and, for the same reason as his regret, relief. The room is grey to reflect these mixed feelings; of course, the colour also reflects miscegenation, asserting through Ondaatje’s autobiographically metacritical position that in real life race is never black or white — never simple, always symbolic, and partly determined by the spaces we inhabit and the modes of representation, such as music or photography or fiction, that teach us to learn or unlearn race.

From his own imagined room, to the rooms of Bellocq, Webb, and Robin, Ondaatje creates private spaces whose windows into public spaces are in a condition of ongoing breakage. The imagined geography in Coming Through Slaughter is not only an indirect sign of historical segregation and limits imposed on Buddy because of racism; the domestic or domesticated spaces in the novel also symbolize Buddy’s inability to run from celebrity, which he probably thought would take on the qualities of his freestyling music. Instead, his celebrity delivers him into the ironic privacy of the asylum where he lived out the last 24 years of his life. His celebrity and its technologies both colour and invert the public/private relationship, disorienting his sense of identity while promising a disturbing future. Coming Through Slaughter acknowledges the appeal of stardom through Webb’s influence on Buddy, but then the novel shows that the negative consequences of celebrity outweigh the appeal. In Coming Through Slaughter, celebrity ultimately, and ironically, helps to naturalize race by ontotechnologically marking people with racial colours. By hardly colouring his characters, and by using technologies of stardom to racialize rooms instead of people, Ondaatje demands us to see that race is unnatural, defined in part through symbolism and hence aesthetics. Furthermore, he reminds us not only that the mass media and the culture of celebrity have a key role in producing racial signification, but also that race enacts its own star-making by serving a technological function.