This essay examines the recurring motifs of lightness and darkness in Michael Ondaatje's postmodernist novel In the Skin of a Lion (1987), set in early twentieth-century Toronto. Through close reading of the text, the essay explores how physical, emotional, and racially coded uses of light and darkness illuminate the protagonist Patrick Lewis's journey of self-discovery. The analysis draws on the novel's fragmented, cubist narrative structure and considers how imagery of colour, shadow, and illumination intersects with themes of immigrant identity, class, and cultural displacement. Scholarly perspectives from Rochelle Simmons and Glen Lowery inform the discussion of race and narrative voice.
Motifs of lightness versus darkness — in physical, emotional, and metaphorical respects — run throughout Canadian émigré author Michael Ondaatje's postmodernist novel In the Skin of a Lion (1987), set in Toronto during the 1920s. The frequent interplay of these motifs is intricately woven throughout the structurally fragmented text. Ondaatje's central character is Patrick Lewis, a 21-year-old new arrival to Toronto from rural Ontario — a young man who feels emotionally hollow and who is in search of himself. Simmons (1998) observes that Patrick describes himself, vis-à-vis other characters in the story, as "nothing but a prism that refracted [the other characters'] lives" (157).
Other descriptive uses of lightness and darkness, as motifs, images, or both, abound within the story as well. Later on, for example, when another key character, Caravaggio, watches a woman named Anne through the window of her boathouse, what he sees is described thus: "In this light, with all the small panes of glass around her, she was inside a diamond, mothlike on the edge of burning kerosene, caught in the centre of all the facets" (198). This essay analyzes descriptive uses of light and darkness within Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion in terms of physical light versus physical darkness, emotional light and darkness, and racially determined conceptions of "light" and "darkness."
In the Skin of a Lion is arguably a bildungsroman — a coming-of-age story — about the personal development of Patrick, an "immigrant" of sorts (within his own country) to Toronto. Patrick comes from a very different part of Canada, and after his arrival he embarks on a whole new way of life. As the story opens, the starkness of Patrick's childhood and adolescence — often described, in flashback, through images of either light or darkness — has left him emotionally bereft and enveloped in a kind of emotional darkness. That darkness dissipates gradually throughout the novel, however, as Patrick learns and accepts more about his true self, and recognizes his capacity not only to love, but to grieve.
Perhaps fittingly, the woman who most inspires Patrick is named Clara, which means "light." In a similar vein, the character Caravaggio bears the name of an Italian Renaissance painter celebrated as a master of chiaroscuro — the dramatic interplay of light and darkness.
Narrative voices within the story combine to help shed light on events and circumstances, some accurate and others pure fiction. Together, these fragments comprise a compelling composite portrait of Toronto and of daily life within the city. The fragmentation of narrative voice is the "cubist structure" — which could equally be described as prismatic — to which Simmons (1998) refers.
Historical truth, such as the real-life construction of the Bloor Street Viaduct and the R. C. Harris Filtration Plant, and the real-life disappearance of the enigmatic millionaire Ambrose Small, combines with elements of pure fiction to illuminate, impressionistically, snapshots of immigrant (and quasi-immigrant, as in Patrick's case) experience in Toronto. Ondaatje's descriptions of light, darkness, and, by association, colour or its absence, almost always underscore related themes and oppositions — for example, of urban (well-lit, busy) versus rural life (stark, dark, deserted).
As Ondaatje tells us early on: "Patrick Lewis arrived in the city of Toronto as if it were land after years at sea . . . he had been drawn out from that small town like a piece of metal dropped under the vast arches of Union Station to begin his life once more . . . He was an immigrant to the city" (In the Skin of a Lion, p. 53). Still, however well-lit and teeming with activity the city might seem to the newly arrived Patrick, he is nevertheless a stranger here. Along with all those who hurry around him inside Union Station, he realizes he is "in the belly of a whale" (p. 54).
This image of engulfment — of being swallowed by an enormous, shadowed interior — is characteristic of Ondaatje's use of darkness to signal emotional as well as physical disorientation. The grandeur of the built environment, lit by the energy of the modern city, only throws Patrick's inner emptiness into sharper relief.
Patrick's memories of his rural childhood are most often fragmentary recollections replete with either light or darkness, always vivid and mostly both physically and emotionally cold. From his bedroom window as a boy, for example, Patrick makes out the shapes of itinerant Finnish loggers on their way to work in the icy Canadian winter. As he recalls: "Before daybreak the men were working — through the worst storms, in weather far below zero — and they finished at six" (p. 16). Early in the morning, they work "wrapped up in the darkness," awaiting the "energy of the sun" (p. 7).
Patrick recalls disliking "the whiteness" of familiar Ontario snowstorms, and, conversely, having loved "only things to do with colour" (Ondaatje). His remembrances of summer are filled with images of black (less pleasant recollections) and of colour (more pleasant ones), often within the same memory sequence. For example, in summer Patrick recalls:
Blackflies and mosquitoes. Leaping not into hay but into the black underwater colour of creek . . . chewing rhubarb . . . you bit the glossy skin of the raw rhubarb and ripped its fibres open . . . You put the smallest pellet of raspberry onto your tongue. (pp. 53–54)
Neither childhood memories of pure white nor of pure darkness stir recollections toward which he feels greatly drawn. What he fondly recalls instead are early impressions of vivid colour mixed with strong sensory impressions seen through a child's eyes: yellowish hay, bright pink rhubarb, reddish-purple raspberries, brown wooden barns, and the cow manure within them. Upon first arriving in Toronto, alone in Union Station and speaking his name aloud to no one in particular as throngs of strangers rush past, Patrick knows that they — and he — are all, together, metaphorically swallowed in emotional if not physical darkness.
"Race, ethnicity, and class encoded in light and dark imagery"
Michael Ondaatje's descriptive uses of light and darkness within his novel of early twentieth-century Toronto, In the Skin of a Lion (1987), contain motifs of physical light versus physical darkness, emotional light and darkness, and racially determined conceptions of "light" and "darkness." In childhood, neither light nor darkness in any of the pure or symbolic forms in which Patrick has experienced them — winter, summer, nighttime, daylight — provides him with positive recollections. Metaphorically, either extreme is bereft of inherent vitality or richness of meaning.
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