Object and Practice Creative Labour Throughout Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion

Abstract

Throughout In the Skin of a Lion, which was published in 1987, Michael Ondaatje portrays forms of labour that blur the boundaries between work and art, and thus between high and low culture. The text's blurring of these boundaries shows how the text reflects both postmodernist values and Marxist theory. Raymond Williams wrote in 1973 that the “true crisis in cultural theory,” during the time in which both he and Ondaatje were writing, was between the view of “art as object” and the alternative view of “art as practice” (1349). Throughout In the Skin of a Lion then, Ondaatje expresses how labour is both worthy of celebration, as it constitutes a sort of art in itself, but also how readers can be critical of the forms of labour depicted, as they reveal brutal aspects of capitalist society.. In his depictions of the forms of labour that Nicholas as a builder, Alice as a performer, and Patrick as a caregiver partake in, all of which trouble the distinction between work and art, Ondaatje questions whether art is a practice or an object and dually refuses to draw stark divisions between the two.