The Suspension of Certainty: Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter and the Philosophy of Schizophrenia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sri-Lankan Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje is well known for exploring the possibilities of suspended states and spaces between absolutes in both his poetry and prose work. This paper aims to analyze such themes in Ondaatje’s first (and often overlooked) novel Coming Through Slaughter (1976) as they are presented through the medium of jazz music and the symptoms of “Dementia Praecox. Paranoid Type” (133). Previous scholarship regarding this novel has been primarily concerned with the tragic implications of the uncertainty that seems inseparable from states of suspension, but I suggest a reconsideration from the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of schizophrenia. The paper argues that this novel’s formal and thematic insistent destruction of frames is not only consistent with the concepts of assemblages and the body-without-organs as described by Deleuze and Guattari, but also productively engages in negative capability. Read in this way, Coming Through Slaughter offers valuable insight into the evolving cultural context of mental health issues in North America.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".