Our Own Stories:
Intersubjectivity in Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero
Spoiler: Don’t read Michael Ondaatje’s novel Divisadero if you want to follow a particular character or set of characters as they work their way through the conflict. Divisadero uses an unconventional storytelling method that moves from character to character, often leaving its readers confused and wondering where the story has gone, but I suggest that such character-crossing action works in a performative way to demonstrate the psycho-analytic theory of intersubjectivity. The basic tenants of this theory are laid out in Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Life, a book by Robert D. Stolorow and George E. Atwood. In the book, the two psychologists attack the “myth” of modern society that views the human mind as isolated from the body. They advocate a subjectivity which people share with nature and society, “an experience constituted and sustained by particular intersubjective fields.” The events and characters in Divisadero span both space and time to illustrate these “intersubjective fields.”
The intersubjectivity of the novel is emphasized on its first page, with the inclusion of an omniscient narrator who soon disappears. Anna doesn’t really disappear so much as she tells her story through the stories of the other characters, and she herself becomes a third person character, being described and viewed by another omniscient narrator. Through this movement between so-called omniscient narrators, Divisadero is able to display a sense of intersubjectivity. Each narrator becomes the intersubjective field, in which the subjects interact. Because the narrator provides this framework, these subjects are able to interact in spite of the separation that exists between them.
In line with the theory of intersubjectivity, Divisadero works to dispel the idea that the mind is isolated, and it does so through the implied interconnectedness of its characters. As identities merge throughout the story’s meandering plot, the concept of intersubjectivity extends beyond the relationship of the separated siblings, who remain connected in the space of intersubjective fields. Divisadero goes on to suggest an even greater level of intersubjectivity that exists between the past and the present. In part two of the novel, “the family in the cart” is, in a sense, the family that was separated in the previous pages, and the writer’s house that Anna comes to live in is an echo of the farmhouse she grew up in. The cart, the cabin, the house—they all can represent the concept of intersubjective fields because they are all containers, mediums in which subjects exist, just as the book Divisadero contains the potential subjective experiences that its readers will have.
It isn’t much of a step from there to see literature, in general, as an intersubjective field. Anna’s first words begin with “By our grandfather’s cabin . . .” Her use of the word “our” lets us know that it is also our cabin. Not only does this cabin belong to all the characters within Divisadero, but it will also house its readers during their “stay.” Anna practically looks at her reading audience as she muses, “We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell” (136). Anna’s emphasis on “our own stories” allows us to claim these stories as our own. If everyone is connected through intersubjectivity, in the sense that we share a common environment and society, then however indirectly, everyone has actually helped Michael Ondaatje in the writing of Divisadero; and, indeed, each reader who reads the text recreates an intersubjective experience and, in fact, makes the story his or her own.
-- Jason Hogue
