More than serving merely as a metaphor, jazz-its formal rules-can play a structuring role in society and literature. Focusing on In the Skin of a Lion, this essay explores the way that Michael Ondaatje uses the concepts of solo and chorus to improvise and create order at both levels.

Given that jazz is a relatively recent musical form, it is not surprising that studies of its connection to literature are few in comparison to the discussions of the relations between literature and classical music, where indeed the proliferation of such discussion has developed to the point of occasioning some specialists to define and insist upon criteria for "valid" comparisons. Thus in the section on "Literature and Music" in the 1990 Modern Language Association manual entitled Teaching Literature and Other Arts, Robert Spaethling has emphasized the need to distinguish between literary works/studies in which music functions as a metaphor/allusion and those in which music functions as a structural device. More recently, in Performing Rites, Simon Frith clarifies the grounds for such a distinction when he explains that a musical genre consists of a "a set of musical events (real or possible) whose course is governed by a definite set of socially accepted rules" (91). Structural comparisons draw upon the formal rules that distinguish a musical genre from other genres whereas metaphoric comparisons usually make use of non-formal rules which Frith, following the pioneering work on musical genre of Franco Fabbri, itemizes as the semiotic, the ideological, the behavioral and the commercial (91-93). To date, most of the jazz/literature connections have been of the metaphoric kind; F. Scott Fitzgerald's description of the 1920s as the "Jazz Age" (Tirro 170), for example, evokes the ideology of cultural subversion and restless excitement that white audiences associated with the music and, though usually unacknowledged, with African-Americans. More cogent is Ralph Ellison's recognition in his essay on Charlie Christian in Shadow and Act (233-40) of the semiotic importance of jazz in African-American culture which is evinced by the way that he and other black writers like Langston Hughes and James Baldwin associate the improvised nature of such music with the thoughts and emotions of their characters. In the case of Jack Kerouac, however, there is an attempt to exploit not merely the metaphoric possibilities of jazz but also to use it as a structuring device. Not only was On the Road written on a roll of toilet paper so that the composition could, like jazz improvisation, occur "in a continuous manner without the benefit of rewrites," as Ted Gioia observes (Art 61), but as Kerouac himself argued in his Book of Blues, these jazz poems were "limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus" ( 1 ) .

If we look, in turn, for a more contemporary example of a writer who enlists both the metaphoric and structural potential of jazz few are more instructive than Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje, probably best known by movie-goers for the Oscar-winning success of the recent film adaptation of his 1992 novel, The English Patient. While always interested in the cinematic, his earlier works also include several jazz-influenced pieces that utilize the postmodern technique of merging the actual and the imagined. For example, in a poem from the 1984 volume Secular Love, he has the blues singer Bessie Smith, who died in 1937, perform as an angel at Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall which opened in 1982. Similarly, in his 1976 novel, Coming Through Slaughter, he imagines the life of the actual jazz musician Buddy Bolden, one of the progenitors of jazz whose music was never recorded. It is, however, in his 1987 novel, In the Skin of a Lion, that Ondaatje's use of jazz is most sustained and most extends beyond the metaphoric to inform the structuring of the work.

Discussing the gestation of Skin of a Lion, Ondaatje has noted that he was influenced by three sources: Diego Rivera's "Detroit Industry" mural at the Detroit Institute of Art, cubism, and "jazz with its solos and chorus" (qtd. in Butterfield 165). While the debt that he here acknowledges most directly is to Rivera's mural, it is also possible to see, as Ondaatje does in the novel, a theoretical commonality between these three apparently disparate sources, and one could argue that the jazz element is perhaps more pervasive than he himself realizes. In the following essay, therefore, after first identifying the major characters and configuration of Skin of a Lion, I will focus attention on the seminal moment in the novel when the protagonist, Patrick Lewis, experiences an epiphany about the relationship of the individual to the larger social collective as he listens to a jazz band playing in the street, a performance which I will then locate historically and musically through a brief overview of the evolution of jazz and its formal rules and terminology. With this context in place, I will go on to discuss three areas of applicability: first, via the two epigraphs featured in the novel, how jazz principles relate to general types of story-telling and particularly the relationship of master narratives to marginalized voices; second, how Patrick's development and creation of his own voice involves both the solo improvisation and retrospection that characterizes jazz; third, how Ondaatje's reordering of historical ingredients and defeat of conventional generic expectations adheres both to the spirit and structuring rules of jazz. While Ondaatje's use of jazz has not gone unnoticed by his critics, by approaching the novel in this way I hope to demonstrate that his practice merits more than passing references to what Douglas Barbour has called the "improvisational complication" of his use of language (210).

Skin of a Lion begins roughly in 1913 when Patrick Lewis is eleven and living with his father in Bellrock, Ontario, and follows him, sometimes taking wide detours, to 1938 when he is residing in Toronto. Like many postmodern novels, Skin of a Lion blends the fictional and historical, and during the course of the novel Patrick forges relationships with characters of both types. Among these are two women: Clara Dickens, mistress of the millionaire Ambrose Small, a historical figure who disappeared without a trace from Toronto in 1919, and Clara's friend Alice Gull, Patrick's lover, who dies while carrying an anarchist's bomb that explodes prematurely, and whose daughter Hana is ultimately adopted by Patrick. As a result of his various experiences and relationships-including his befriending of the bridge-worker turned baker, Nicholas Temeloff, and Caravaggio, the neighborhood thief-Patrick comes to some understanding of himself and his place in the world; indeed, he acts out this selfknowledge by becoming a political activist which, ultimately, leads him to encounter the historical figure, Rowland Harris, who built Toronto's Bloor Street viaduct and Harris Filtration Plant. Patrick's tale is the one that links the other stories in the novel, and although his story is told in seemingly omniscient fashion, the narrator's perspective on events is by no means consistent and often mirrors the apparent discontinuity of Patrick's own development.

While in the novel occasional metaphorical reference is made to jazz musicians, Fats Waller for instance (147), and jazz tunes, such as "I Can't Get Started" (225), Patrick's most profound realization about his relationship to the outside world occurs as a direct consequence of hearing a jazz band playing on the street: "The cornet and saxophone and drum chased each other across solos and then suddenly, as Patrick drew alongside them, fell together and rose within a chorus" (144). The time is roughly 1930; his lover, Alice, has died and he is beginning to piece together her story by unearthing photographs in the library of the construction of the Bloor Street Viaduct. Listening to the jazz performers in this context, Patrick comes to realize how his personal narrative, like the solos of the musicians, is at once separate and part of a broader social narrative:

The street-band had depicted perfect company, with an ending full of embraces after the solos had made everyone stronger, more delineated. His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices. Patrick saw a wondrous night web-all of these fragments of a human order, something ungoverned by the family he was born into or the headlines of the day....the detritus and chaos of the age was realigned. (144-45)

Although this passage contains the only extended reference to jazz in the novel, the scene is not only critical in Patrick's development but also provides insight into how Ondaatje uses jazz to shape the novel's narrative structure.

What complicates such a discussion, significantly, is the extent to which jazz terminology is often apparently inconsistent, a factor related to the evolution and hence different types and period styles of such music. Moreover, as Jerry Coker explains, jazz itself, in its earliest form, was a pastiche that drew upon a number of heterogeneous musical sources: "African rhythms and `blue tones; European instruments and harmonies, marches, dance music, church music and ragtime" (Listening 3-4). Jazz language, it should also be noted, grew out of practice rather than theory and it still bears some of the ambiguity of its origins. "The language of jazz," as Leroy Ostransky observes, "was coined, for the most part, by jazz musicians with little regard for the written word" (Anatomy 3). While much has been done to standardize the terminology, there is, as Gioia notes, still a fundamental lack of agreement over even a definition of the music itself: "Jazz writers learned long ago...that it is almost impossible to come up with a good, succinct, widely accepted definition of jazz itself" ( West Coast 360).

Working definitions, however, are possible, and several of the terms used in the portrayal of the jazz musicians in Skin of a Lion-"solos" "chorus," and "chased" (144)-are meaningful within the jazz community. The term "solo" in music generally means to perform unaccompanied or with support from some kind of rhythm section. Solo can also refer to the performance of composed or improvised music, although in jazz the term almost universally implies improvisation. The term "chorus," in music generally, implies collectivity such as a choir, the refrain of a song or the particular section of an orchestra (Lovelock 21). In jazz, however, chorus has a somewhat different meaning as Mark Gridley explains: "What musicians meant by the term chorus was simply that segment of a solo which used the entire thirty-two measure AABA chord progression or entire twelve measure blues progression. A soloist might take only a chorus or perhaps take ten to twenty choruses" (41). The chord progression refers to the harmonic structure which underlies a melody; for instance, the traditional twelve-bar blues typically involves harmonic movement from a tonic chord, C Major say, to chords based on the fourth and fifth scales degrees of C Major. The composed melody is based on notes derived from these chords and is usually played at the beginning and ending, the head and tail as they are known in jazz, of a performance. Between the head and tail, the musician improvises on the tune's chord progression: "The chord progression is usually retained with exactness throughout the selection, even during the improvised solos, simply by repeating the entire progression...over and over" (Coker, Listening 9). The soloist interprets the preset melody according to his or her taste, but even if the solo is melodically unrecognizable to the listener, the chord progression still orders the improvisation.

Although in Skin of a Lion Ondaatje appears to use the term "chorus" in a different way, his usage has some precedence in jazz where chorus is occasionally used to refer to the chord progression which underlies both predetermined and improvised melody. For instance, in describing the arrangement of Billy Strayhorn's "Take the W' Train" as performed by Duke Ellington's 1941 orchestra, Gridley mentions under the heading of First Chorus that "Saxes state melody...in unison" (102). A more recent example comes from New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliett who describes trumpeter Tom Harrell playing "a nearly straight chorus of melody" of "Skylark" before beginning his improvisation (94). Hence, there is some precedent in jazz criticism for the term chorus being applied to the statement of a preset melody.

There is, however, a crucial distinction between preset melody and improvised melody. The former is predetermined-it may be on paper or in the musicians' heads as appears to be the case with Ondaatje's musicians who "suddenly...fell together and rose within a chorus" (144)while the latter is entirely spontaneous; it is this feature which is the essence of jazz. In The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture Gioia remarks that "improvisation, if not restricted to jazz, is nonetheless essential to it....Certain composed works-Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, for example-may sound `jazzy,' but what we hear is not jazz until the spontaneous element of improvisation is added to the written parts" (51). Even melodies which were initially improvised become preset once they are recorded; henceforth, they can be transcribed and repeated by other performers in the same way that composed melodies are. Thus it is the improvised melody that provides jazz with its unique musical vitality: "as soon as the jazz instrumentalist begins to plan his solos in advance, he ceases, by that very act, to be a jazz soloist and becomes a type of composer" (Gioia, Art 128).

The style of jazz played by the musicians in Ondaatje's novel is most likely Pre-Swing, a transitional style between New Orleans jazz and Swing in which many of the elements of the jazz styles-for example, improvisation framed by a head and tail of notated melody-associated with Swing and bop were already in place (Ostransky, Understanding 165). Moreover, Ondaatje's musicians are "chasing" each other or alternating improvised passages of a set length. This practice, which is "Rooted in the timeless call-and-response forms of the earliest African and African-American music" (Gioia, West Coast 35), is also known as trading fours or eights. This form of improvisation further suggests that when Ondaatje's musicians play together in a chorus they are not following the New Orleans model of collective improvisation.

The instruments that Ondaatje mentions-trumpet, saxophone and drum-further support the assumption that this music is Pre-Swing rather than New Orleans jazz. While the cornet was associated with the earlier period-Louis Armstrong's switch to trumpet in the mid-1920s initiated the changeover for many cornetists-the saxophone was almost unknown in New Orleans jazz; by the end of the 1920s, however, the tenor and alto saxes had for many come to symbolize the music (Ostransky, Understanding 162). Furthermore, the fact that Ondaatje's drummer appears to be participating in the improvisation places the jazz style later rather than earlier. Indeed, percussion solos would have been quite unusual in the early 1930s since as Gridley notes it was not until much later that drummers did more than act as keepers of the beat (58).

The particular time implied by both the novel's context and the jazz allusions would place the scene at the beginning of the Depression-presumably the musicians are playing to attract monetary contributions from passers-by. There are two monophonic instruments, the sax and the cornet, and the drums, and all three are taking turns improvising and then playing together in an ensemble. Aside from the selection of instruments, the impromptu nature of the performance suggests that the sax and cornet are stating in unison a preset melody with the drums providing rhythmic accompaniment. The predetermined melody would be one that could be easily memorized and perhaps more importantly be familiar to their potential audience. Given the evidence available, it thus seems reasonable to conclude that Ondaatje uses the term solo for an improvised spontaneous melody (or rhythm in the case of the drums) that is based on the chord progression of the composed, preset melody. When he refers to chorus, unlike most writers on jazz, he suggests the performance, in unison, of a notated melody.

Skin of a Lion opens with two epigraphs each of which is suggestive of a different narrative strategy but which together function in a manner strikingly similar to jazz's chord progression. The first epigraph, from the ancient Sumerian myth The Epic of Gilgamesh, provides the novel with its title: "The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion." The second epigraph is a comment by Marxist novelist and art historian John Berger: "Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one." The quotation from Gilgamesh features a narrative context; it introduces a speaker, implies a relationship with someone who has died, and suggests an action that will be taken. Berger's comment, in contrast, is outside narrative; it is a critical observation on the nature of all story-telling. What needs emphasis, however, is that his comment does not constitute a total rejection of narrative and its constituent elements as organizational devices; he simply argues that there are no longer any such totalist narratives as that of The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Just as in jazz where both notated and improvised melody are bound together by a common chord progression, the twin epigraphs of Skin of a Lion bear a paradoxical relationship with each other. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Sumerian fertility myth from the third millennium B.C., recounts the deeds of the builder king Gilgamesh. In the epigraph, which derives from the Babylonian version of the myth, Gilgamesh expresses his sorrow and remorse after the death of his friend, Enkidu, a natural or wild man. During the quest that follows, Gilgamesh hears the story of a vast flood that destroyed most earthly life and discovers a flower of eternal life but allows it to be stolen by a snake. The similarities with the Old Testament, noted by critics like Alexander Heidel, suggest that Gilgamesh is ancient and foundational and has claims to absolute order, both characteristics of master narrative which Linda Hut-cheon has described as "those systems by which we usually unify and order...any contradictions in order to make them fit" (x).

As J. Hillis Miller notes, however, it is important to distinguish between two major types of narrative, the historical and the fictional. Even though both are "closely related forms of order-giving' or order-finding,'" historical narrative is thought to deal with "events that `really occurred' on the stage of history" (68), while fictional narrative invents its materials. The Epic of Gilgamesh, then, can be seen as the progenitor of all narratives which claim to be truthful or real, including the historical, the religious, the scientific, and even the musical. The Berger quotation, the other epigraph used by Ondaatje, however, compromises The Epic of Gilgamesh and suggests that it is not the only narrative but just one of many. Berger's concept of story, moreover, applies equally to both historical and fictional narrative. Stories are human constructs that are necessary for ordering experience regardless of whether the materials they draw upon are invented or they "really occurred." The Berger epigraph typifies what Hutcheon terms historiographic metafiction, the paradigm of the postmodern; such works, she writes, are "intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages....[this] theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs...is made the grounds for [the] rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past" (5).

Characteristic of most poststructural thinking, Berger's observation frees the voices of those, women and immigrants for instance, who were marginalized by the master narratives of the past. From the perspective of the master narrative and the social elite who are its main proponents, this stance is perilous because it seems to lead inevitably to a Tower of Babel of competing voices and stories all of which are equally legitimate; such legitimacy, however, would also be at odds with the postmodernist project which "tries to problematize and, thereby, to make us question. But it does not offer answers. It cannot, without betraying its anti-totalizing ideology" (Hutcheon 231).

Jazz's "solos and chorus" reflect the narrative paradox expressed in Ondaatje's twin epigraphs. Notated melody, or chorus in Ondaatje's terminology, acts as a master narrative that has been naturalized in Western culture; from this perspective jazz improvisation, like Berger's comment, seems potentially dangerous because it questions the preset melodic structure. As the unnamed narrator of Baldwin's "Sonny Blues" says of jazz, "It sounded weird and disordered" (42). Improvisation (the solo in Skin of a Lion) subverts the hegemonic and totalizing nature of composed melody, yet at the same time improvisation itself is bound to the melody by the chord progression. The same chord progression thus binds the two forms of musical narrative, "solos and chorus," without being committed to either one until the moment of performance. While this suggests that jazz is deeply imbued with the ironic sensibility that one associates with postmodernism, what needs to be remembered is that such music evolved many years earlier and out of a very different cultural climate. As commentators such as Lawrence Levine in Black Culture and Black Consciousness and Amiri Baraka [Leroi Jones] in Blues People have pointed out, there is a long African-American tradition of using music as a way of ironically subverting white domination that can be traced from the Antebellum period, to black minstrels and, finally, to jazz.

Ondaatje's goal in Skin of a Lion is to create a spontaneous narrative order by drawing from sources that self-reflexively include both the historical and the fictional. This technique has been present is his work as early as The Collected Works of Billy the Kid in which he creates a dynamic tension by fictionalizing the historical figure. He has created the same dynamic in Coming Through Slaughter and "Bessie Smith at Roy Thomson Hall" in which he takes historical jazz figures like Buddy Bolden or Bessie Smith and places them in a fictional situation. Skin of a Lion, however, reverses this technique. Instead of concentrating on a historical figure and the implicit narrative order provided by such a character, he places a fictional character-the protagonist Patrick Lewis-in a historical context in order to liberate the untold stories of those who have been silenced or marginalized in the official records. Thus he must create a new kind of order, one that is firmly indebted to the solo improvisation.

As Ostransky points out, the jazz solo may be spontaneous but it does not emerge out of nothingness:

[The improviser] modifies and adapts, to his individual conception of jazz, melodic fragments, rhythmic patterns, and even entire phrases he has heard and admired. All of these memories and impressions are assimilated and transformed into music that is fresh, and often, when it is coupled with the spirit of spontaneity, music that is new. The performer's task is to organize his material-however spontaneous his performance may seem-in such a way as to make it appear that the material is, in truth, his own. (Understanding 60)

Ondaatje partially creates the impression of improvisation in the novel through the way that Patrick attempts to develop his own voice by selfconsciously borrowing from different elements in the world around him while, at the same time, remaining part of the novel's social world or chorus. Patrick's story, in turn, is only one part of Ondaatje's own improvised solo, in which he creates for the reader/listener a larger story that is fused together from highly eclectic sources and that draws upon and alters the reader/listener's understanding of the historical narrative.

Skin of a Lion, it might be argued, is a postmodern Bildungsroman, the traditional novel of maturation such as Great Expectations or Sons and Lovers, that takes a young innocent on a chronological journey to some kind of maturity and place in society. What is particularly noteworthy about Patrick's character at the novel's beginning is the degree to which he is an outsider. He lives in a place "which did not appear on a map until 1910" (10), he has no mother and his father is taciturn and "as invisible as possible" (18). When Patrick later moves to Toronto at twenty-one in 1923, he is characterized as "an immigrant to the city" (53). Although he feels "more community" (79) after he has met Clara Dickens and Alice Gull, this feeling evaporates after Clara's disappearance. By 1930, he finds himself living in an immigrant section of Toronto, "not hearing any language he knew" (112) and working on the waterworks tunnel "where he feels banished from the world" (107). As the narrator observes: "He has always been alien, the third person in the picture. He is the one born in this country who knows nothing of the place" ( 156-57).

Patrick clearly is a character whose life at this point in the novel is almost as decontextualized as possible. This lack of context is similar to what Gioia in The Imperfect Art describes as the apparently arbitrary fivenote phrase with which Charlie Parker begins his famous improvisation on the preset melody of "Embraceable You," and wherein his use of the initial phrase "in a variety of ingenious contexts throughout the course of this improvisation" (60), ultimately results in a melody that is rich and complex. Gioia refers to the principle at work here as the retrospective form which governs the development of improvisation: "the improviser may be unable to look ahead at what he is going to play, but he can look behind at what he has just played; thus each new musical phrase can be shaped with relation to what has gone before" (61).

In the case of Skin of a Lion, it is through Alice Gull and her stories of her husband's work as a labor leader that Patrick becomes more engaged in his surroundings and begins to order his life retrospectively: "He knew now he was the sum of all he had been in his life since he was that boy in the snow wood" (152). Looking back, he is now able to understand, to "order and shape" (9) his childhood experience with insects and to realize that the foreign skaters with bulrushes that he saw when he was eleven were Finns: "Now in his thirties he finally had a name for that group of men he witnessed as a child" (151). His epiphany while listening to the jazz band on the street occurs while he is trying to piece Alice's past together: "he could add music by simply providing the thread of a hum. He saw the interactions, saw how each one of them was carried by the strength of something more than themselves" (144). Afterwards, like a developing solo, his character resonates with increasingly greater depth. This process is similar to the conclusion of Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" in which the narrator realizes that his brother's improvisation has made sense of their shared past: "He had made it his: that long line, of which we knew only Mama and Daddy" (50).

In this context, one should note that throughout Skin of a Lion, not only jazz but music in general is used as a device which links individuals with a broader social and cultural world. As a boy living in an isolated rural community, for example, Patrick plays "the ocarina to give himself a voice, something to leap with over the wall of the place" (10). Worth more emphasis in turn is the way that Ondaatje configures Canada as a nation of immigrants, wherein what binds each ethnic group together is its own band and music. Thus reference is made to the Russian Mission Band ( 114), the Anglo-Canadian Band ( 166) and the Finnish Brass Band which plays Chopin's "Funeral March" at a burial service-during which an eclipse occurs and the music both literally and metaphorically becomes for the mourners "a lifeline from one moment of light to another" ( 159). Music, then, provides a kind of historic continuity or sense of history through which characters can both assert their individuality and share in a broader cultural enterprise or social chorus.

As a political activist, Patrick goes to prison for bombing a resort hotel in the Muskokas, and later makes an abortive attempt to blow up Harris's waterworks. In his personal life, in a phone conversation with Clara about Alice's daughter Hana, he claims "I am her father" (218), and at the very end of the novel, when he drives to Marmora with Hana to rescue Clara, he promises that he will tell her Clara's story (219), a promise that means he must again explain and reorder the past. Having himself become a fully "delineated" solo, the chorus that he implicitly joins at the end of the novel is one that is made up of the stories of all the characters, both historical and fictional. The melody of the past has been made richer and more complex through their solo contributions.

By placing Clara in Marmora (derivative of the Latin marmoreus for marble) Ondaatje also returns to the beginning of Patrick's entrance into the larger group, for what had impressed him upon his arrival in Toronto as a young man was the "smooth pink marble pillars" at Union Station (54), and it is also to this "nexus of his life" that he returns after he gets out of prison fifteen years later (209). He recalls saying goodbye to Clara here when she was leaving him for Ambrose Small and how she told him to pay attention to marble: "Its Missouri Zumbro. Remember that. The floors are Tennessee marble" (209-10). Marmora thus fuses and enlarges into one story Patrick's various arrivals in Toronto, his affair with Clara and hers with Ambrose Small, his present relationship with Hana and hers with her parents; even Rowland Harris who dreams of building "marble walls" (109) in his waterworks is linked to the others through this motif. Traditionally associated with the architecture and statuary of the past, marble thus becomes less an inert memorial substance and more a part of the living chorus and historical continuity.

As a solo improvisation that builds by retrospectively ordering preceding musical phrases, the development that characterizes Patrick's life is also characterizes the novel as a whole, with Ondaatje functioning as the improviser and the reader as the listener. The reader approaches the novel with certain generic expectations about plot and character, and these are the elements that Ondaatje reshapes to form a new melody. Like Parker's apparently random five-note sequence, Skin of a Lion begins with a prologue that for the reader has no context or explanation and that does not become comprehensible until the very end of the novel. The characters are not identified, the setting (except for a reference to Marmora) is obscure and the historical time is not provided. The narrator, however, is also quite explicit about the method he is using: "The first sentence of every novel should be: `Trust me, this will take time, but there is order here, very faint, very human"' ( 146).

A jazz solo, Richmond Browne notes, is a balance between the expected and the unexpected: "The listener is constantly making predictions; actual infinitesimal predictions as to whether the next event will be a repetition of something, or something different. The player is constantly either confirming or denying these predictions in the listener's mind" (qtd. in Coker, Improvising 15). Ondaatje both confirms and denies the reader's narrative expectations of setting, character, plot and narration. By forcing the reader retrospectively to find ways of ordering the novel, Ondaatje forges a new solo that alters the historical narrative/chorus.

The novel is set in the southern Ontario and deals with actual places such as Toronto, Huntsville, and Marmora, and historical events such as the building of the Bloor Street Viaduct and the construction of the Harris Filtration Plant. Historical personages, such as Rowland Harris and Ambrose Small, appear in the novel; these characters are usually from the privileged classes and it is this privilege which transforms their stories into the official historical narrative. Ondaatje, however, seamlessly combines such geographical locales and historical characters with those of his own invention. Bellrock, Patrick's home town, is a fictional place from Ondaatje's 1979 poetry collection There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do, as well as an actual village located near Kingston, Ontario where Ondaatje once owned a summer property. In Skin of a Lion also "invented," as it were, are immigrants and women whose stories have been marginalized by the so-called "official history." Ondaatje's model here, as he presents it in the novel, is the American photographer Lewis Hine whose work depicted those-women, children, the poor, unionists-who were disenfranchised by capitalist industry: "Official histories and news stories were always soft as rhetoric....Hine's photographs betray official history and put together another family" ( 145).

Like Hine, and like Berger, in Skin of a Lion Ondaatje suggests that the unrecorded stories of the men and women who built the bridge and the waterworks are equally as legitimate as those of Harris and Small. Ondaatje's solo in the novel gives their stories a voice. Alice Gull's husband, Cato, for instance, is a union organizer who is murdered by strikebreakers in northern Ontario. Patrick, although a native Ontarian, is an outsider to the real historical narrative, and must learn from it in order to construct his own narrative or solo: "Patrick had lived in this country all his life. But it was only now that he learned of the union battles up north....The facts of the story had surrounded Hana since birth, it was a part of her" ( 157).

Ondaatje also occasionally provides his fictional characters with historically resonant names in order further to problematize the narrative. Cato, the unionist who opposes the logging bosses, is paralleled by the historical Cato of Utica who opposed Julius Caesar and who killed himself in protest. Similarly, the thief Caravaggio, who escapes prison by painting himself blue, bears the same name as the Italian Renaissance painter who was interested in contrasts of light and dark colors, one of the major motifs in Skin of a Lion. After his first robbery, Caravaggio hides from his pursuers in a mushroom factory: "There was darkness again and he yearned for light" (194). Even the actual place names that Ondaatje uses, such as Paris, Ontario, both confirm and deny the reader's expectations in that this town is both an actual place and a fictionalization of the French capital.

The novel's plot, like Patrick's story and the jazz solo, unfolds temporally; structurally, the narrative is divided into three "books" (which are further divided into titled chapters) that follow one another in time. However, within this structure there are also discontinuities. For example, while Patrick is the novel's central character, he does not appear in "The Bridge," the second chapter of Book One, which takes place in 1918 and deals with the construction of the Bloor Street Viaduct in Toronto and introduces characters such as Alice Gull and Nicholas Temelcoff. "Caravaggio," the title of the first chapter of Book Three, focuses on the thief from Patrick's neighborhood in Toronto whom he meets in prison. These wide digressions from the central story of Patrick's development are often cited as a weakness in the novel because they deal with characters who are either entirely new or of whom only brief mention has been made earlier.

As Gioia notes, however, improvised jazz, "by its very nature, tends towards apparent formlessness, towards a breakdown of structural coherence, towards excess" (Imperfect 92). Similarly, I would argue that these chapters are deliberately designed to thwart the reader's conventional expectations and to force him/her to create an enlarged conception of plot and character that will accommodate such shifts. Actually, moreover, in both cases the two seemingly anomalous characters become important parts of Patrick's life; indeed, Caravaggio later appears as a character in The English Patient in which Hana, Patrick's adopted daughter, is the central character. Yet even if the digressions thus eventually resolve back to Patrick, they also make it clear that his is just one of many intertwined stories.

Ondaatje also problematizes the authority of the main narrative by introducing other forms of discourse which intersect with the main plot. As critics like Gordon Gamin and Michael Greenstein have pointed out, the novel not only borrows its title from The Epic of Gilgamesh, but also, at least in part, its plot and characters. Other intersecting texts include the letters from Patrick to Clara Dickens (84-86) and newspaper reports on the disappearance of Ambrose Small (56). Ondaatje also introduces the opening passage of Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese (82), a work noted for its strict observance of the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action (Klinck 678). This inclusion not only helps to pinpoint the historical frame of events-Ostenso's novel was published in 1925-and to describe Patrick's need for order in his life but also enables Ondaatje to engage in a deliberate parody of traditional fictional narrative which encourages totalizing expectations.

Self-reflection or parody, now regarded as a defining characteristic of postmodernism, has actually been an important aspect of jazz since at least the innovation of bop in the early 1940s. Musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker would improvise new melodies on the chord progressions of existing songs as a way of showing up the musical inadequacy of their elders. As Ostransky notes: "In Charlie Parker's recordings of Bird Lore' and Ornithology" for example, both numbers have their harmonic basis in `How High the Moon"' (Understanding 203). Quoting, which entails playing an entirely different but familiar melody at an apt point during improvisation, is another parodic device used by a host of such greats as Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and particularly Dexter Gordon: "Gordon's repeated recourse to brief excerpts from cornball pop standards, and even an occasional snatch of a classic, has been for the most part judicious in execution, and genuinely funny in impact" (Britt 126).

In the same fashion, the novel's narrator, by both confirming and denying the reader's expectations of narrative, parodies the concept of narrative unity. At times Ondaatje assumes a third-person narrative voice that resembles that of a historian. He provides, for instance, a list of the actual companies that participated in the building of the Harris waterworks ( 109). Later, when Patrick is released from prison in 1938, the narrator places him within the context of a historical narrative that includes movies, songs, events, and construction projects (209). Ondaatje, however, subverts the historical narrative by having the narrator make the meta-comment that the reader must trust the narrator that order exists. The diction in other sections of the novel is often oblique, as in the invented death of Ambrose Small who dies thinking of "Bitten flesh and manicures and greyhounds and sex and safe-combinations and knowledge of suicides" (214). Sudden shifts in time are another way she narrator undermines the chronological historical narrative. After Patrick hears the street band, for example, the narrative shifts without explanation to a time when Alice is still alive ( 146).

Like someone listening to a jazz solo, the reader tries retrospectively to order the new melody that Ondaatje creates in the novel. Until its final pages, the reader does not know that Alice Gull was killed while accidentally carrying an anarchist's bomb or how the italicized opening lines of the novel fit the rest of the narrative: "She listens to the man as he picks up and brings together various corners of the story, attempting to carry it all in his arms" ( 1). This dislocated scene becomes comprehensible only at the end when Patrick and Hana drive to Marmora to get Clara Dickens, and where it obliges the reader to reorder his/her conception of what has gone before.

Ondaatje is well aware that once the novel has been read, like improvisations on a standard's chord progression, it becomes another preset melody. What he is trying to convey in the italicized opening is the very moment of spontaneous creation before the story has become codified, in the same way that the landscape through which Patrick and Hana travel is magical, anything is possible: "The man who is driving could say, `In that field is a castle,' and it would be possible for her to believe him" (1). He takes care, therefore, to problematize the frame itself, so that in the concluding scene the driver is Hana, not Patrick who, in fact, has a broken arm at this point in the story and could not drive: "Hana sat upright, adapting the rear-view mirror to her height. He climbed in, pretending to luxuriate in the passenger seat, making animal-like noises of satisfaction" (244).

Ondaatje's goal here is to collapse the novel's complex narrativesincluding his improvised solo which rearranges history and obliges the reader to reconfigure his/her concept of historical narrative to include the marginal as well as the famous-into the story of a single individual, Patrick Lewis. Like a jazz musician, Patrick is passing on the tale of his life (or solo) and that of the age in which he has lived (or chorus). Like the chord progression that paradoxically joins melody and improvisation, Patrick, like Ondaatje and the reader, is both an individual and a part of his particular historical and cultural moment. The recipient of his knowledge is his adoptive daughter Hana who represents the future. Appropriately, she does not know how to drive and Patrick must coach her as they proceed into the night.

Insofar as Hana appears later as the central character of The English Patient, the conclusion leads paradoxically back to the beginning of the novel and onward to the future. Ondaatje, it should be noted, is remarkable for this kind of continuity; explosives and explosions, for instance, figure significantly in Skin of a Lion as they do in The English Patient. In commenting on the novel's final line/word, Michael Greenstein has argued that Patrick's command of "Lights" (244) refers not merely to the automobile's headlights but also suggests the moment when filming is about to commence, as in the director's order "Lights, camera, action" (118). I would argue, however, that jazz can be credited as being at least one of Ondaatje's inspirations for such a cyclic frame. Just as a jazz tune typically begins and ends with a statement of the preset melody, so it is possible to regard the novel itself as a form of improvisation which, in its return to the frame at the end, is ordered by Patrick's narration.

In The Imperfect Art Gioia remarks that there is a strong relationship between jazz improvisation and the oral tradition (130). This same orality can be seen in the way that Patrick's story or solo connects with the novel's title, which simultaneously refers back to The Epic of Gilgamesh with its vernacular provenance and within the novel to the performance that Alice puts on at the waterworks-wherein a skin becomes the narrative device that empowers individuals to tell their stories before they pass it on to the next story-teller. The telling of our individual stories, our solos, Ondaatje seems to say, at once defines us and confirms our place in the chorus of our culture.

Ondaatje's use of "solos and chorus" in Skin of a Lion thus functions as an instructive example of how the formal rules of jazz might profitably be applied not only to other literary works, but also any study that is concerned with the dynamic between the individual narrative and that of society at large. Indeed, in "Miles Davis meets Noam Chomsky," Alan Perlman and Daniel Greenblatt have argued that jazz improvisation provides interesting insights into the nature of linguistic practice; as they see it, the individual speaker uses his/her implicit knowledge of grammatical rules, which function much like the chord progression in jazz, to construct speech in an individualized fashion. Similarly, the improvisation and retrospective ordering that characterizes jazz might also provide helpful directives for those investigating the schema aspects of cognition or reader-response dynamics. And wider yet, jazz theory might also offer productive models for researchers in disciplines like political science, sociology and anthropology, as well as anyone concerned with understanding the dialectic between the individual and society.

So to cheer me up, and because I realized that I am posting something or the other here almost everyday (mostly as a way to distract myself from myself), I decided that I need to change my logo. And by fortuitous circumstances I discovered the work of Hundertwasser, an Austrian artist. I think it is highly impossible to view these paintings, and still feel as angst-y as before. Thus-ly a logo is made out of a painting, a sort of a reminder to myself that life does not follow (perhaps it was never meant to) the tyranny of straight lines, that it spirals, circles, sits in large blobs, sprouts as trees from high windows, grows globular Islamic domes, slides on floors that are slightly titled, is slightly deranged, and is always colorful, even in moments of heavy sadness (what would its color then?). Also here are few further links.

And here is today's music video (courtesy YouTube), featuring Cowboy Mouth, a band from New Orleans (now nearly gone, Lordy!) whose music is not very well know, perhaps deservedly because they are not all that sonically hot, but whose live performances resemble some good ol' fashioned revival meetings, i.e., they rock in the truest sense. My first encounter with these gentlemen took place a few years ago, when I was a greenhorn at the Heartbreak Bar, and to substitute that fallible religion called Love, I took to live music. It was a concert of some 30,000 souls all jumping up and down hollering as Fred beat mad rhythms on those drum, and make all of those present believe, for a moment at least, in the milk of human kindness and love. So yes, if they are coming to a town near you, kind readers, you should go get some religion.

Speaking of New Orleans, I wonder if anyone of you have read Michel Ondaatje’s novel "Coming Through Slaughter"? It apparently is styled like set of jazz tunes, with improvisation at its heart. While the writing in this novel, like the latter novels, throws off sharp sparks like those that can be seen off a knife grinder's wheel, I felt it doesn't somehow congeal into an artifact called a novel. Maybe this is because of my limitations as a reader?