Lost Children:
The Writer’s Imaginative Progeny in Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero

He will never know what becomes of his children.  He will not know whether he has nurtured or damaged them.  A girl travels down the long California valley in a commercial refrigeration truck, hardly able to speak, as a result of her fear or bravery, listening to every word of the good stranger.  Lucette in Paris sips absinthe with her lover.  The boy Rafael will meet me, a woman from the New World….And Coop?  And Claire?  Will these children in their eventual cities, turn out to be the heroes of their own lives? (272-3)

This passage from Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero identifies the narrator as Anna, a writer of fiction, and to that extent suggests that much of the narrative is a product of Anna’s imagination.  The passage makes a claim about the importance and ease of substitution, the means by which one character is substituted for another in Ondaajte’s exploration of a writer’s relationship to the fiction he or she creates. 

In this passage, the narrator, who until now has remained unnamed and unidentifiable, defines herself as “me, a woman from the New World.”  We now know that the narrator is female and that she is from America, often referred to as the New World.  Moreover, the passage tells us that she Rafael “will meet” her, and since we already know of Anna and Rafael’s affair, the passage implies at this point that the “me,” or narrator, can only be Anna.  But who is this Anna, and what is her relationship to “these children”?

There are many “children” that the passage identifies.  The first child is “the girl” that can only be Anna.  Earlier in the novel it was Anna who ran away from home with the help of a trucker.  The narrator refers to her only as “the girl,” never naming her in the way that she names the other children.  The girl is “hardly able to speak” which suggests that the girl must find other ways in which to communicate.  Thus, the passage implies that it is through her imaginative writing that Anna finds her means of expression.  Instead of talking, the girl “listen[s].” Anna, as the girl, learns to take heed of people’s stories in order to incorporate them into her writing.  By including herself in her speculations about her characters, Anna highlights her own creative method.  It is a method that entails the writer’s alienation from his or her self.  As the narrator tells us on the first page of the novel, “For I have taken myself away from who I was with them, and what I used to be.”  Fiction writing is Anna’s means of stepping outside of herself.  Just as the children and the fathers in this novel recreate families to replace the ones they have lost, so, too, the writer—Anna—creates them as a function of her own unnamed loss. 

Since Anna is both the narrator and a character, it is not without reason that she takes the place of the “he” at the beginning of the passage.  “He” is a character, a father of children.  These children are very much in fact characters who Anna “nurtures” into existence.  She develops and cares for her characters much like the father cares for his children.  He does not know “what becomes” of his children once they have left him.  He does not know how they are received in the world, whether they are loved or hated, or even known.  So, too, the passage implies, the writer of fiction ultimately disowns her beloved characters, setting them in motion in an imaginative landscape she only partly controls.   

-- Dawn Johnson