The Art of Addiction

The theme of “addiction” in Michael Ondaajte’s Divisadero seems to be the novel’s way of conveying the thorough and inescapable alienation of its characters.  Yet, the bond between addiction and art in Divisadero seems to be a little more complicated than a simple desire for hiding.  Addiction, as a rule, is a compulsion toward an object that becomes habit-forming and intrinsic to the character of the addict. This inherently obsessive quality in addiction ensures alienation, an alienation that, in the novel, frequently occasions intimacy, happiness, or even love. While “addiction” generally refers to a drug or substance abuse (which is, mind you, also present in the novel) I would argue that in Divisadero expands the definition such that art itself is the object of a compulsive dependency.  Recognizing most of the characters in the novel as addicts of one type of another makes visible the compulsive dependencies that are intrinsic to all of the interpersonal relationships in Ondaajte’s novel.

While Cooper, Claire, and Bridget’s drugs of choice are blatantly stated in the novel, whether they be risky horse riding or card games, Anna’s vice isn’t as simple to define. However, Anna’s passion for archiving, her penchant for mining literature and rampant escapism, qualifies her as an addict of art. Further, Anna’s dependency on art as a place to “save” herself with the protection of a “third-person narrator”(142) both defines and necessitates her estrangement. In Coop’s case, in fact, the dependency on addiction itself is essential. It is only Cooper’s attempt to walk away from the card game, and from Bridget, that evokes the loss of his memory and results in his symbolic death. “Obsession, so finely tuned, is misplaced with this dramatic loss of autobiography” (153), and thus Anna, Coop, and Claire, whose autobiographies are composed of fragments knotted together, disappear from the novel.

Consequently, the characters in the novel only attract other alienated characters, and insist on their fragmentation. In other words, the interpersonal communication is lost without the presence of an addiction external to the intimacy. For instance, Cooper admits that “had [Bridget] not been an addict, if she had not been one whose life seemed engaged with many others… he probably would have avoided her” (115-6). Similarly, Anna and Rafael are strangers to one another just as Roman and Marie-Neige pose as siblings and become “anonymous to each other” (216). Lucien Segura, as Anna’s analog, is also an addict of stories, of a “life imagined” rather than a “life lived”. His is an obsession with romances, with stories that, like the ones he and Marie-Neige read together, are “stuffed with unbearable love” (201). Love, in the novel, cannot exist independently of alienation, estrangement, and intimacy occasioned by the sacrifice of the individual to a greater passion.

The person formerly known as Anna writes of Divisadero, “it might derive from the word divisor, meaning ‘to gaze at something from a distance’” (142). The characters in the novel are only capable of intimacy through the lens of the addict, only able to connect to each other if they are gazing askance, “from a distance”. It cannot be seen head on, and never fully. Their personal addictions not only serve to individualize them, but to bind them together, so that they become the “spiraling among a handful of strangers [that] tangles into a story” (137).

--Savannah Stephenson