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영어

This article explores suppressed histories of those residing on the margins of social power as counter-narrative against the official history in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987). The novel is a ‘historiographic metafiction’ and deals with the immigrant workers in Canada. It is centered on the construction of the Bloor Street Viaduct and the Toronto Waterworks at the beginning of the 20th century. To dispel the myth of documentary objectivity and to recuperate the hidden histories of the dispossessed, the novel writes the counter-narrative silenced by the official archive. And it exposes the internal colonialism hidden in the past history of Canada. My reading relies upon two epigraphs that show the themes and aesthetics of the novel. Through a seeking of the past, Patrick Lewis’ journey from passive observer to political actor is mirrored in the first epigraph taken from the Epic of Gilgamesh. The second epigraph comes from John Berger’s G. It implies the style and strategies Ondaatje employs, such as fragmentation, indeterminacy, estrangement, and ambiguity in the form of collage. Also I read this novel focusing on colonialist psychology from the viewpoint of the colonial subject, the cultural outsider. I suggest that the novel reveals the ways in which colonialist psychology operates to sustain the imbalances of cultural power, that is, the colony within.