Crossing the Borders of Jazz, Language and Identity: Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter

Michael Ondaatjes's Coming Through Slaughter (1977) is "arguably the best novel about jazz ever written" (Dyer 1998); it focuses on cornet player Buddy Bolden, a key musical figure in early 20th century New Orleans, blurring the lines between facts and fiction, form and content, music and writing about music. Ondaatje, indeed, succeeds in translating Bulden's sound in a literary form which escapes easy definitions; Coming Through Slaughter stands as a powerful polyphonic narrative, whose very heteroglossia (Bakhtin) is nourished by a multiplicity of voices, narrators, genres and discourse modes, such as poems, replicas of institutional documents, song lyrics, photographs. The novel features memorable descriptions of jazz music, through a prose, which very often turns into poetry and in which sudden shifts in tones, timbre, rhythm and tonality seem to convey the effects of improvised jazz. In a sense, the novel becomes what it narrates, modelling the non-conformity of the music it takes as its subject-matter, to the extent of voicing the otherness of Bolden' s highly dissonant sound in his very last days. Interestingly, this allows Ondaatje's narrative to exceed the boundaries of 'conventional' jazz, to project towards the experimentations and sonic "displacements" Gilroy (1993) mentions in relation to Bolden' s most iconic heir, namely Miles Davis. Coming 'Through' Slaughter is a novel about bridges, crossings but also and foremost about thresholds; in the novel Ondatjee invites the reader to inhabit these very thresholds, that is to embrace uncertainty and doubt as privileged spaces to access reality in the postcolonial present. Ondaatje's artistic and political engagement is towards a redefinition of the every notion of identity; Bolden's musical and necessarily unstable identity asks for a process of self-questioning by the reader, inviting her to inhabit a liminal space in which sound and ink, self and other, the symbolic and the semiotic (Kristeva) might coexist and speak to each other, constantly redefining themselves.