Music in Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero

Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero uses musical references to enhance our understanding of how the story’s characters inhabit time and place. The book’s three parts unfold against a varied musical backdrop that can be experienced as a kind of soundtrack. Although musical allusions appear in Ondaatje’s earlier work, Divisadero is marked by its range of musical references, which run from classical compositions to jazz, opera to rock ’n’ roll, reggae to blues and British new wave. This article examines the way music directs us to see different narrative options in each of the novel’s three parts. One impulse behind the narrative is to connect us to the immediate, to locate the story in mimetic terms that are rooted in the California and Nevada settings that form the backdrop to the first part of the book. The musical references in this part serve to reinforce this sense of presence, as if history could be located and understood in terms of the themes and issues conveyed in particular songs. But another impulse is to work against the immediate, to cast the characters and their experiences as part of an allegorical universe in which actions and choices are symbolic, metaphoric, transhistorical