Archival Writing: The Ethical Study in Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero

• Main Authors: Wei-ting Chen, 陳煒婷
• Other Authors: I-ping Liang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/64610394696582134713

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 99 === Divisadero can be seen as a shift in Michael Ondaatje’s writing career. In this novel, he diverts his early concern about issues on politics and identification to the intimacy and privacy of people. Ondaatje is appealed to the fissure of artistic representation and orthodox history as he tends to experiment with writing conventions and trespass upon the unknown history. This thesis dwells on the ethical dimension of Divisadero, which is closely related to Ondaatje’s writing style and themes, but is seldom touched upon by critics. I base my discussion upon Jacques Derrida’s idea of archive fever and Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical thinking in a bid to read how Anna, the female protagonist in Divisadero, responds to the other’s call and transforms her personal trauma via archival writing. Chapter One concerns itself with people’s obsession with the irrevocable past and modern identity politics. I apply Derrida’s idea of “archive fever” to examine Anna’s passion for the archives in relation to her traumatic memory and the crisis of her identity. Chapter Two centers on the interactive and intersubjective process of Anna’s search for the silenced other in history. The theories of Richard Holmes and Laura Marcus are used as the backbone of my interpretation in this chapter. I argue that writing creates immediacy and force between Anna and the historical other since she not only leaves traces on her target subject but suffers from autobiographical trauma in turn. However, only by means of writing can she face up to the split intimacy between her and her disclaimed family obliquely. My primary concern in Chapter Three is on the ethics of archival writing. Levinas’s theorization of ethics is employed to explore how Anna assumes a new ethical self by entering into a relationship with the other. I suggest that through writing, Anna connects her personal trauma with the suffering of the forgotten other in history. Sublimating her singular interaction with the other to an aesthetic creation, Anna turns the archives, a place where the silenced other lingers, to a place of understanding, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Keywords: Michael Ondaatje, Jacques Derrida, archive fever, archival writing, writing the other, Emmanuel Levinas, ethics, traumatic subjectivity, Divisadero