Memorable Gestures

I first encountered Michael Ondaatje's work twenty years ago when I picked up a slim volume titled The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. It was a chance encounter, but I was immediately struck by the book's wildly original way of providing a detailed portrait of a man whose mythological stature overshadows the few known facts of his life. When I sought out this quirky experimental novel again recently in the Iowa City public library (thinking to use it in my writing workshop as an example of effective character sketches), it was classified as nonfiction, perhaps because the librarians simply didn't know what to make of it. The book uses various devices to portray the notorious outlaw: a series of sketches of the characters who surrounded him, newspaper interviews (that may be real or made up), the occasional picture and the thoughts ascribed to him by a dime novelist who is the putative narrator of the novel. I was looking for a passage that had stuck with me for more than two decades, a portrait of Pat Garrett that I wanted to share with my students. It goes, in part:

Pat Garrett, ideal assassin. Public figure, the mind of a doctor, his hands hairy, scarred, burned by rope, on his wrist there was a purple stain there all his life. Ideal assassin for his mind was unwarped. Had the ability to kill someone on the street walk back and finish a joke....
 At the age of 15 he taught himself French and never told anyone about it and never spoke to anyone in French for the next 40 years. He didn't even read French books.

Although I still love this passage (this novel and Ondaatje's memoir Running in the Family are my particular favorites), reading it again I can't help but notice the distinctive flaws in the writing as much as the pleasures it offers. Here is a character portrait that actually reveals almost nothing about the character's underlying personality. Here are enigmatic utterances (how can someone who kills without affect have an "unwarped" mind?) and the occasional lapse in grammar--that unnecessary second "there" after "purple stain." Most striking is the idiosyncratic description of Garrett's act of teaching himself a language he will neither use nor take credit for knowing. It's a memorable gesture, but what the hell does it mean, and are we really to believe it?

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