Description:
There is more to the cameo appearance of civic photographer Arthur S. Goss (1880-1940) in Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion than another instance of historical verisimilitude. The city of Toronto's first official photographer, Goss's oeuvre provided Ondaatje with a set of civic images enabling him to reconstruct his version of the past, as shown in Duffy 1994. Goss's career as a civic official also entwined him in the careers of two of Toronto's most potent modernizers, Charles J. Hastings and Roland C. Harris (the latter a character in In the Skin of a Lion). They in turn produce the discourse of power that remains one of the novel's themes. Thus Ondaatje's Goss returns to life as the writer's fellow visionary.