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영어

Sri-Lankan Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje is well known for exploring the possibilities of suspended states and spaces between absolutes in both his poetry and prose work. This paper aims to analyze such themes in Ondaatje’s first (and often overlooked) novel Coming Through Slaughter (1976) as they are presented through the medium of jazz music and the symptoms of “Dementia Praecox. Paranoid Type” (133). Previous scholarship regarding this novel has been primarily concerned with the tragic implications of the uncertainty that seems inseparable from states of suspension, but I suggest a reconsideration from the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of schizophrenia. The paper argues that this novel’s formal and thematic insistent destruction of frames is not only consistent with the concepts of assemblages and the body-without-organs as described by Deleuze and Guattari, but also productively engages in negative capability. Read in this way, Coming Through Slaughter offers valuable insight into the evolving cultural context of mental health issues in North America.