Michael Ondaatje’s "Divisadero" as rhizomic novel

Michael Ondaatje’s novel Divisadero (2007) can be considered a global novel — although it resists certain aspects of globalization — not only because it stages a variety of geographies, from Nevada and California to Southern France, but also because it portrays orphans, displaced subjects, gypsies, all characterized by a nomadic existence and ideology. In particular, Anna, the American protagonist, retraces the biography of a French writer, Lucien Segura, which causes her eventually to embody and write through Colette, the well-known French feminist writer. It is particularly the genre of the fictional biography that translates the death of the author (Segura) into an autobiography (Anna’s own life story) through which Colette’s own autobiographical path surfaces as a ghostly ancestor. The international scenario also encompasses the Second World War as well as the Gulf Wars and the novel balances the right to oblivion with the importance of memory to retrieve the past. This essay is aimed at illustrating how nomadism and cosmopolitanism remain central paradigms in Ondaatje’s global narrative and how they become embedded in the genre of the fictional biography.