“Everything is collage,” (16) declares Canadian poet-novelist Michael Ondaatje in his 2007 hybrid narrative Divisadero, and a strong argument can be made for Divisadero taking Pablo Picasso’s 1913 Cubist collage Guitar as its primary framing device. Ondaatje’s methods of adopting and adapting the concepts of a visual medium to the printed page require not only the play of simultaneity and fragmentation that are among his more familiar themes, but also a fresh concern with the spatial and temporal positionality of the reader as a viewer of the novel’s unfolding events. This paper provides a close reading of three predominant images in both Divisadero and Guitar—a guitar, glass, and a blue table—in relation to the precepts of synthetic Cubism, and reinforces the potentiality that interdisciplinary art offers in respect to the complexities of reflection and recognition across differences of form.
Fragmentation and Simultaneity
Themes and Characters as Collage
The Guitar, the Glass, and the Blue Table
Conclusion
Works Cited