Beauty with an Explanation and the Poetics of Acculturation: How, and Why, Michael Ondaatje’s Poetic Novels Work

Michael Ondaatje’s first three novels, those which cemented his international fiction career, each use a pattern in which metaphors which begin as isolated comparisons of A to B are also sequentially repackaged into the lesser known (but equally substitutive) trope of metonymy. In sequence, this metonymic use of metaphor fuses the self-evident comparison of metaphor with the more acculturated substitution of metonymy – a substitution taught within a culture, not self-evident like a metaphor – ultimately enacting a poetics of acculturation. Loading a novel’s metaphorical terms with sequential meaning was crucial to an Ondaatje who was not only transitioning from poet to novelist, but doing so in an aesthetic fusion of the postmodern and the postcolonial also found in other late-twentieth-century postcolonial novels.