國立中山大學外國語文研究所
碩士論文
A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Institute of Foreign
Languages and Literature
National Sun Yat-sen University
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts
編織抗拒力：
麥克•翁達杰《英倫情人》中之歷史、空間、與身份
Mapping Resistance:
History, Space, and Identity in Michael Ondaatje’s
The English Patient
研究生：潘芸芝
BY: PAN YUN-CHIH
指導教授：張錦忠 教授
ADVISOR: PROFESSOR TEE KIM TONG
中華民國九十五年七月
July 2006
中文摘要
麥克•翁達傑在小說《英倫情人》中描寫第二次世界大戰中被邊陲化的四位
角色以表達從屬子民在混亂的社會背景中的抗拒性。本論文試圖以第二次世界大
戰與後殖民之歷史、空間、與身份為切入點，探討本書中的後殖民抗拒主題。論
文第一章著重於闡釋後殖民文學如何拒絕並抵抗西方霸權論述之單一歷史，並為
從屬子民發聲，以書寫不同於單一論述的後殖民歷史與記憶。第二章以地理與身
體空間為主軸，討論小說如何將殖民主義與帝國主義去疆域化，造成小說中破碎
無疆域的地理環境與身體空間。第三章著重於描寫小說中主要角色之離散與破
裂，且失去固定身分的去中心狀況。本章並點出其互相依賴以成形的新舊文化身
份。翁達傑並大量運用互文性，使小說中的角色與劇情和文學藝術作品相呼應或
抵觸，以達到作者欲顛覆傳統西方文化之用意。
身為後殖民的子民，翁達傑為替從屬者發聲，在《英倫情人》中大量引用西
方霸權之文化經典以作為其解構重寫的題材，並於廢墟之上編織後殖民之文化典
範。這小說正是一部不同於殖民及帝國歷史、空間、與身份的論述的文本。小說
中，歷史與空間的交替形成了一個不同於西方官方歷史所論述的世界。本論文旨
在證明作者翁達傑以歷史、空間、與角色身份編織被邊緣化的角色的抵抗力。
關鍵詞: 麥克•翁達傑、
《英倫情人》、後殖民性、文學抵抗、歷史、從屬、回憶、
空間、去疆域化、次要文學、製圖、邊陲化、身分、互文性。
Abstract
The thesis attempts to describe resistance in terms of history, space, and identity
in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. The first chapter of the thesis sets out to
elaborate the historical context of the novel, and its influence on the subaltern personas.
The chapter aims to demonstrate how postcolonial literature rejects Western official
history, providing an alternative voice for the subaltern subjects in the novel. In the
second chapter I focus on the spatial politics of the novel, bringing geographical and
bodily space into discussion by means of adopting the concepts of de- and
re-territorialization. It designates how the broken geography and the wounded body
characterize the marginalized characters and their dwelling space. Chapter Three is
dedicated to the study of the personas’ identity and their relationships, which are
formed and developed under emotions of lack and desire. In this chapter I also discuss
the intertextuality of the novel, exemplifying how the novel mirrors other literary works
and art works, borrowing yet subverting the classics of Western civilization.
In The English Patient, Ondaatje voices for the subaltern, adopting Western
classics as the objects of revision. He maps the resistance of the subaltern on the ruins
of the Western classics by rewriting the Empire’s histories, space and subaltern
identities. The mergence of alternative histories and spaces interweaves a fictional
world that is divergent from the official Western world.
Key words: Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient, postcoloniality, literary resistance,
history, subaltern, memory, space, deterritorialization, minor literature, mapping,
marginalized, identity, intertextuality.
Table of Contents
Introduction ...............................................................................................................
1
Chapter One:
(Re-)Telling History and Remembrance ................................................................. 21
Chapter Two:
(Re-)Mapping a Wounded Geography and Broken Body ....................................... 41
Chapter Three:
Unmasking Representations of Identity ..................................................................
59
Conclusion ..............................................................................................................
79
Works Cited ............................................................................................................
85
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Introduction
General Introduction
Set in wartime Italy, Michael Ondaatje’s intriguing novel The English Patient
portrays four characters of different backgrounds, encountering and dwelling in a
small villa at the end of the Second World War. The nove l received the Booker Prize
in 1992 and continued to enthrall the cinematic audience as it was “transformed” into
a movie by director Anthony Minghella, bringing home nine Academy Awards in
1996. Although many critics have rightly pointed out that much difference lie between
the plot of the novel and that of the film, both works nevertheless conquer the readers
and the audiences repeatedly with the protagonist’s ex-centric and self-abandoned
personality and the love affair between Almásy and Katharine. Drawn to the
interactions of the characters and their complicated yet intriguing relationship,
Ondaatje explains in an interview:
I don’t like to throw characters into a plot as though it were a raging
torrent where they are swept along. What interest me are the
complications and nuances of character. Few of my characters are
described externally; we see them from the inside out. (Slopen 48)
Since Ondaatje’s interest is built on “the kind of people who behave as though there
were a finite number of words” (Slopen 48), his concentration of the characters’
depiction is demonstrated not on the elaborated dialogues and conversations, but on
the characters’ interior monologues.
Employing a multidimensional perspective in his novels, Ondaatje furthermore
states that he does not “want the reader to feel locked into one character” (Slopen 49).
As he comments:
I love that sense that history is not just one opinion. I prefer a
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complicated history where an event is seen through many eyes or
emotions, and the writer doesn’t try to control the viewpoint. It is only
when one steps back from those small things which are knitted together
in the narrative that one can see, as Henry James said, “the figure in the
carpent. (Slopen 50)
The English Patient is thus a collection of mosaic events and viewpoints from
different characters of different backgrounds, under the single event of the Second
World War. It portrays four traumatic characters who, being abandoned in the warfare,
suffer from the loss of identity in one way or another. It begins with Hana, the nurse
who betrays her job and persistently takes care of the unknown patient, whose
appearance is beyond recognition, and who m Hana is convinced to be an Englishman.
They are later joined by Caravaggio, the thief whose illegal business is ironically
legitimized by the government as he is trained as a spy, and Kip, a Sikh sapper who
joins the British squad of defusing bombs and mines, literarily serving for the empire
that colonizes native Indian. The novel is filled with various small stories of irony and
wounds from the overwhelming invasion of war and the trauma that resulted from it.
It reveals and narrates the minor incidents and personal stories that are neglected by
the official history of Western hegemony of the Second World War, emphasizing that
the war not only causes the trauma of Europe but also that of the insignificant
individuals within.
Literature Review
Generally accepted as a postcolonial text, The English Patient discusses
numerous issues that are widely analyzed in the postcolonial spectrum, such as the
narratives and the reinterpretation of history and remembrance, temporal as well as
spatial crossings of boundaries, wounded body as the map of resistance, identity
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formation, and the compensated desire of the traumatic characters. Among various
critical responses, the subversive narratives of history and memories that are distorted
and re-narrated in the novel are granted with most attention. These topics are
explained in Rufus Cook’s two essays, entitled “‘Imploding Time and Geography’:
Narrative and Compressions in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient” and “Being
and Representation in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient.” Concentrating on
finding the textual evidence of the fragmentary and discontinuous element of the
novel, Cook contends that “[t]he book is filled with references to ‘fragments’or ‘gaps’
or ‘shards,’to ‘fractions’ or ‘remnants,’to characters who have been ‘disassembled’ or
‘reassembled,’to tapestries that have been ‘slashed apart,’ murals that have ‘crumbled
away’” (1998: 109). Suggesting the novel as a compression of time and geography,
Cook believes that not only the fixed concept of temporality, that is, the linear
development of time, is broken in the no vel, the boundaries of geographies are also
challenged. In short, Cook argues that the boundaries are broken by the overlapping
and the intertexture of geographical and personal spaces.
Moreover, Cook writes that such a compression is beautifully achieved by
means of Ondaatje’s creation of an “impression of simultaneity” (1998: 111), which
discontinuous time and different landscape appear simultaneously not only in the eyes
of the readers, but also in the fragmentary memories and the vision of the characters.
In “Being and Representation,” Cook observes that the repetitious motifs in the novel
that connect and conjure the memories of the characters are taken from other literary
or art work. According to him, intertextuality serves not only as a theme in the novel;
it also helps to shape the characters’ identity. Cook argues that the imitation or
representation is evident in the characters’ identifying themselves with figures or
events from literary or art works in history. Works of art, such as novels, paint ings,
murals, and frescos, function to establish the characters’ identifications, “helping them
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to define their identities, their purposes, their relationships with others” (Cook 1999:
36). While the patient’s representation of identity is exemplified by the other
characters’projection of desire, their identity representations are testified by means of
their readiness to accept alien forces, such as the plot of a literary work, or the
incident of a historical event. However, Cook claims that the circle of repeatedly
imitating literary or historical figures or of recycled events makes the starting point
impossible to detect. The novel thus sinks into the repetition of recurrent events and
episodes. He also points out the fluidity of the narrative, picking up where he left off
in the other essay. He determines that although the chronologically disoriented
narrative appears fragmented, the narration that Ondaatje adopts does achieve what he
calls a “time-defeating” mode, in which the concept of time is abandoned from the
text, allowing readers to feel the timeless arena.
Amy Novak’s essay, “Textual Hauntings: Narrating History, Memory, and
Silence in The English Patient,” focuses on what she calls the “spectral narrative
economy” in the novel. Resonating Cook’s contestation in pointing out the temporal
fragmentations, Novak states that Ondaatje, making use of the fragmentary reflections
of the patient ’s memories as well as the narrative of the novel, breaks the totality of
Western history, geography, and the identities of the characters. He thus maps the
resistance of the colonized and returns to them the right to voice and narrate their
oppressed history. The “spectral narrative economy” of the novel is the specters of the
silenced past and the colonized subjects. Novak states that by means of interrupting
the coherence and linear development of history, Ondaatje blends the locations with
the characters of past and present, creating an illusory world in the novel, where
“[l]ying just below the surface of the present are the ruins of the past,” and where
“[i]n the midst of the present, the failures of the past reappear” (Novak 211). The
ghost-like past and the disturbed present, along with the people, the events, and the
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locations of the events, are interwoven into one another, and their mingling
relationship becomes un-separated yet disconnected. Novak believes that the English
patient, traumatized by the loss of his lover Katharine and the betrayal of his friend
Maddox, attempts to recover the past by virtue of narrating his memories.
Frustratingly, the past is never to be recovered. Novak mentions that the memories of
the patient, conjuring the memories of the other characters, propel the narration of the
novel forward, “slip[ping] from level to level like a hawk” into what the narrator calls
“the well of memory” (Ondaatje 4). Borrowing Walter Benjamin’s concept of
translation, 1 Novak argues that the memories of the past resemble what Benjamin
refers to as the “translations ” of literary works, which are at most “echoes” of the
original and can never truly represent the spirit of the original literary work. Likewise,
the memories that the patient endeavors to recover and the silence of the past that he
is determined to utter can never represent the past as it was, but vague impressions or
“glimpse” of the past that are composed of splinters of distorted images, sentences, or
sensations from past experience. Thus, the past remains untranslatable as the
memories of the past are disabled to recover it, as the signifier can never accurately
represent the signified. However, employing Benjamin’s theory of translations to
discuss the ill- functioned memories that fail to represent the past seem far- fetched as
Benjamin’s essay concentrates on the translations of literary works per se, rather than
the fragmented memories’representations of the past.
Another critic who draws on Benjamin’s concept of history and allegory in
examining the novel is Marlene Goldman. According to Goldman, the novel is the
1
In “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux
parisiens,” Walter Benjamin discusses the task of the translator by posing the question of whether the
nature of the original “lend[s] itself to translation.” That is, does a literary work written in its original
language alter in the process of being translated into another one? Employing the term “afterlife” to
describe the translations of literary works, he argues that “in its afterlife [...] the original undergoes a
change” (73). Hence, the recommended “task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect
[Intension] upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original”
(76).
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angel of history who fixes its gaze mournfully on the past, and traces the lives of four
ruined characters. 2 The English Patient, as Goldman indicates, demonstrates the
reluctant situation of history’s surrendering to the inevitable and powerful progress,3
which is analyzed in Benjamin’s portrait of the angel, who got caught into the storm
of progress. Goldman rightly explains the parallel structure of Benjamin’s allegory
and his usage of the term “montage ” into Ondaatje’s novel. In terms of the allegory of
ruined images and fragmentation, Goldman contends that the ruined characters,
damaged villa, and the fragmentary narratives mirror Benjamin’s concept. Moreover,
the setting of the Second World War is “the vantage point from which to survey
humanity’s precarious position in wha t both authors [Ondaatje and Benjamin]
envision as an apocalyptic storm that threatens to erase all traces of the past,” as is
exemplified in the painting of Klee (Goldman 904). Goldman also brings up
allegorically the “fall” of burning Almásy from the sky, burning Satan from heaven,
the fall of Western civilization and Asia when Kip hears from the radio the bombing
of Japan. Throughout the essay, Goldman illustrates how Benjamin’s “allegorical way
of seeing” and his idea of history resonate Ondaatje’s novel, and how Benjamin’s
theory provides a proper explanation to the plot, characters and structures of the novel.
The essay concludes with Benjamin’s pessimist urging for a catastrophe in order to
inspire humanity’s longing for redemption, transforming the “history’s deathmask into
the angel’s countenance, and thereby the unresolved ending of Ondaatje’s novel is
apt” (Goldman 921).
Like many postcolonial novels that are composed of fragmentary memories,
2
In the section nine of “Theses on the Philosophy of History” from Illuminations, Benjamin discusses
Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus,” describing the angel as “the angel of history,” whose “face is turned
toward the past,” and who “sees one catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls
it in front of her feet” (257). The angle is, according to Benjamin’s description, “propel[led] into the
future [by the storm of progress] which his back is turned, while the pile of bedris before him grows
skyward” (257-8). For detailed please refer to Benjamin’s Illuminations.
3
In the case of the novel, the Second World War.
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The English Patient challenges the Western world by disrupting its self-presented
history, revealing the violence of projecting its history onto the non-Western world.
These memories, those of Kip’s in particular, segment the official history of the
Western world and penetrate the borders of European history. They “decenter the
authority of Western power, opening up a space for resistance to the colonial past and
drawing forth the colonized” (Novak 223). The novel is accepted as a postcolonial
text not only because it rewrites the colonial history of the Western World, but also
because it is anti-colonial. It attempts to uncover the masks of colonial and erases it
from the non-Western world. As Qadri Ismail contends, “what the four characters
have in common is their relationship to their nationality. ” That is, they are
“‘supplementary to the main argument’of their nations” (409-10). Kip, for instance, is
portrayed as a repressed and marginalized character in terms of his ethnicity and
personality throughout the novel. Hana and Caravaggio, in spite of their Caucasian
ethnicity, are former colonized subjects from Canada of the British Empire. Almásy,
the hero of the novel and the presumed English cartographer, is in fact a traumatized
East European from Hungary, a country “with tenuous claim on a past” and constantly
dominated by foreign power.
In “Discipline and Colony: The English Patient and the Crow’s Nest of Post
Coloniality, ” Qadri Ismail discusses the postcolonial characteristics of the novel and
its relationship with colonialism by means of unthreading the text ’s anti-colonist
response toward colonialism. Moreover, Ismail significantly states that Ondaatje
rewrites Rudyard Kipling’s colonial novel Kim. 4 He writes that “the postcolonial
novel cannot be told without confronting the colonial one, that the former will always
4
Ismail analyzes the difference of Kipling’s Kim and Ondaatje’s The English Patient, and the rewriting
techniques of the latter novel. By means of contrasting the differences and similarities of the two
novels, Ismail concludes that Ondaatje’s intension of rewriting the colonial canon— Kim— into a
postcolonial work is evident.
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contain marks of the latter” (Ismail 413-4). The reason that Ondaatje chooses Kim as
the object of his revision lies in the various aspects of colonial superiority and false
consciousness Kim revealed. Ismail rightfully observes that Kim is “a novel of
conquest; it is the pre-eminent novel depicting and naturalising the conquest of India
within the canon of English literature” (Ismail 414). Not only the characters of the
two novels resonate, the plot and structure of The English Patient echoes that of Kim.
Ismail argues that Ondaatje makes a clear yet relevant comparison by contrasting “He
sat” in the first phrase of Kim to “She stands” in the beginning of The English Patient,
purposely subverting the writing of Kim and the masculine narrative by introducing a
female protagonist as the central character. Also, one of the most obvious instances is
the resemblance between Kim the Irish in Kim and Kip the Sikh in The English
Patient, “[w]here the former is British who successfully passes for Indian, the latter is
an Indian who tries, but fails, to be accepted by the English” (Ismail 418).
Ismail suggests that India, by means of Kipling’s depiction, lives under the
cloud of Western imagination. “Indianness” in Kim, instead of a persecuted ethnicity,
is “understood as the lack of a unifying principle,” inviting the colonizers, the
intended readers of Kim, to bring progress, prosperity, and modernity from Western
civilization. Thus his contestation that “literature inhales, then exhales, history” and
that “the colonial novel does the work of history” (Ismail 417). Stressing that history
is the “complice” of colonialism, Ismail declares that the novel’s question of history
and its authenticity is the central question of postcolonialism. The English Patient
may thus be conceived as a story without history (at least in colonial terms). As he
concludes,
If to have a history is to be able to tell your own story on its own terms,
this option is not available to the postcolonial story. In other words, while
history and colony may be accomplices, history and postcolony are not.
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Indeed, postcoloniality might imply the interrogation of history. (426)
Unlike Ismail, Raymond Aaron Younis, in “Nationhood and Decolonization in The
English Patient,” focuses on Minghella’s film version rather than the novel. Younis
points out that the film’s interpretation of the novel is somewhat different from
Ondaatje’s original text in terms of its turning point at the end and the emphasis of
placing the love affair of Almásy and Katharine rather than the relationship among the
four dwellers in the villa.5 In addition, the film particularly diminishes the role Kip,
the key character who brings out the theme of colonial and imperial concern in the
novel, reduc ing him to a third-world sapper, whose self- identificaiton is constructed
on the recognition of white others. To these two diversions from the novel, Younis
offers a satisfactory explanation that the theme of romance, in the eye of movie goers,
are much attractive than nationhood and colonialism. Comparing to the trauma of
alienation and exile, a heartfelt romance always wins the audience with great tears.
However critics or writers may have no choice but to succumb to the great power of
love, the diminution of Kip’s ethnicity nevertheless abates the film’s profundity.
The distinction of the novel and the film is also discussed in Jacqui Sadashige’s
“Sweeping the Sands: Geographies of Desire in The English Patient.” She excavates
the comparison of the two versions of the story, pointing out the different emphasis of
several aspects made by Ondaatje and Minghella. Sadashige discusses the
representations of history in terms of intertextuality, narrative style, and the
characters’ desire. She indicates tha t Ondaatje’s technique in The English Patient
resembles to that in his previous novels, such as The Collective Works of Billy the Kid,
Coming Through Slaughter, and In the Skin of a Lion. These works, according to him,
5
As the end of the novel, Kip leaves his company because of the heartbreaking news he heard from
the radio about the atomic bombs dropped in Japan. In the film, however, Kip leaves simply because
the troop that he is stationed is moving to another town. The two endings result entirely different
atmosphere, dismantling the theme of nationhood and colonial invasion into romantic departure of two
lovers.
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“all comprise, at one level, the fictional histories of historical personages” (Sadashige
243). Like Younis, Sadashige also mentions the omission of Kip in the movie, and the
patient’s identity, which was originally presented as an unsolved mystery in the novel,
but identified as Almásy in the movie version. The omission of Kip, that is, the
erasure of Kip ’s characterization as a colonized subject and his rage toward the
nuclear bombing in Japan, has transformed the cinema into a completely different
version from that of Ondaatje’s the novel. She moreover questions the praises that are
given to the film. While asserting the preeminence of love and its omnipotence, which
conquers racial and political obstacles, the film devalues the gravity and the
importance of ethnicity. Disapproving of Minghella’s delinquency of the vital subject
in omitting Kip’s racial and political awakening in the cinematic adaptation,
Sadashige comments that Minghella turns Ondaatje’s text into a love story that fits
only in the movie.
Comparing the English patient to Byron, who are both “the figure of the
outsider, master of many languages[...], aristocratic by birth and exile by calling,”
Robert Clark designates the fatal attraction of “the romantic hero” Almásy in
“Knotting Desire in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.” Like many other
critics’ viewpoints that have been examined before, 6 Clark in addition proposes the
essential element of the characters’ relationships, that is, desire. He states that “the
evasion of authority and its consequences is integral to desire in the book” (60). He
also mentions the recurrent scene of decapitation and castration that relate the male
characters in the novel. Caravaggio, the most obvious example, resonates most to the
theme in terms of his name that resembles the great painter in Italian Renaissance and
his cut-off thumbs. As Clark writes, “Caravaggio’s name is that of the famous painter
6
Like Clark, Cook, Novak, Goldman and Ismail have mentioned several motifs such as the
fragmentary style of memories and narratives and the repeated images that are derived form literary
works or paintings. Please refer to former contents.
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who is thought to have been a thief and whose work often depicted decapitation at the
hands of seductive and betraying women, the ultimate scene of castration” (Clark 61).
Caravaggio’s painting “David with the Head of Goliath, ” which is brought up in the
novel, furthermore relates the theme of capitation to the castration of the characters.
Almásy, however, is castrated of the ability to love. His physical condition, that
is, his body, burned by the fire of Geoffrey Clifton’s hatred, and his penis, which
sleeps “like a sea horse,” deprives him of the ability to live and to love again.
According to Clark, the handicap of the English patient brings Hana the erotic love
and desire of “oral pleasure and necrophilia” toward the patient. She drowns herself in
the pleasure of feeding him, washing his body, mourning the tragic love affair of
Almásy and Katherine to the degree of necrophilia. Hana’s inclination to view the
patient as both the father figure and a lover in need of care brings out the theme of
desire, which is passed on by the patient ’s recollection of the doomed love affair.
Moreover, Clark argues that “[w]here Almásy and Caravaggio define themselves
around the phallus and its loss, Kip admits to mother-love, albeit through the
palliating guise of his ayah” (Clark 67). Kip, the alien who only loves strangers’
intimacy, finds comforts not in his family but in his ayah and Hana. Clark concludes
that “[i]n The English Patient, all lovers have to be strangers, all have to lie together
like effigies above the tomb or under the wings of death” (Clark 67).
Analyzing Almásy and Katharine’s identity as well as the desire of ownership in
“‘Call Me by My Name’: Personal Identity and Possession in The English Patient,”
Sharyn Emery asserts the deeply inscribed notion of boundaries that is observed in the
identity formation of the two characters. Citing examples from the novel, she is
convinced that no matter how much one endeavors to cast away the burdens of
boundaries and rules, one’s identities are nevertheless constructed by the boundaries
of names, nationality, ethnicity, and patriarchy. For instance, “Katharine dies because
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she was not identified according to her husband’s last name, a patriarchal boundary
the lovers had swept away” (Emery 212); or in spite of Almásy’s detest in ownership
and the colonialists who attempt to draw the desert within their borders, he becomes
one of these detestable characters as he dehydrates Katharine with his dryness and the
desire of claiming her his own.
Stephen Scobie, in “The Reading Lesson: Michael Ondaatje and the Patients of
Desire,” discusses the anonymity of the patient by means of the symbol of fire that
appears frequently in the novel. Instead of suggesting that Almásy’s desire erases
Katharine’s identity, Scobie declares that Katharine, too, melts Almásy’s identity
away. He contends that the death of Katharine is “a literal fire, which burns away
every trace of her lover’s identity, leaving him as an anonymous patient in an English
hospital” (Scobie 97). However, Scobie notes that Almásy’s loss of identity is of
purpose and intention. As he points out, that the “willed (or faked) loss of identity”
frees him from the limitations of nationality or boundaries of any kind, enabling him
to be assimilated into the desert which he longs for, or any other environments or
circumstances. What is more, “the patient’s anonymity, and his (un)readability, make
him the perfect blank screen onto which the other characters can project their own
devious passions” (Scobie 97-8). Scobie points out that the patient’s loss of identity
becomes other characters’ device to (re-)build their own traumatic identities. That is,
he is free to be identified as a burned patient in order for Hana to project her desired
images, for Caravaggio to perceive him as a traitor, and for Kip to treat him as an
Englishman, the representative of the colonial manipulation of the British Empire, so
that Kip can throw his anger at.
Theoretical Framework
According to Stuart Hall, the postcolonial is “the universalizing displacement,”
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the breaking down of the binary situation of colonialism. 7 It overthrows Eurocentric
histories, temporalities, and ethnic formations, melting all distinctions into a universal
category. Postcolonialism, as Hall comments, “re-reads ‘colonialism’ [...] and
produces a decentered, diasporic or ‘global’ rewriting of earlier, nation-centered
imperial grand narratives” (247). In short, it blurs the boundaries of the colonizing
and the colonized. Chronologically, postcoloniality generally refers to the era that
comes after colonialism, that is, the times of post- independence and “decolonization.”
However, the postcolonial period arrives at different times in different nations, and
has been questioned repeatedly by scholars around the globe. Ironically, the doubt
resonates the characteristic of uncertainty of the postcolonial condition. Like the other
“post-” theories, postcolonialism rejects to be pinned down into a fixed definition or
the idea of being “correctly described.” As reactionary force against coloniality,
postcoloniality refers to a long and disquieting “process,” or what Hall calls the
“periodisation” of decolonization (247). Hall suggests that postcolonial discourse
aims to reverse the clear-cut binary distinction of the colonizer/colonized, the
colonizing societies/their Other, the West/the Rest, inside/outside, central/marginal,
white/color. It blurs the borders of histories, nations, class, and ethnicity, undoing the
boundaries of differences that was prevalent in the colonial system of Western world.
Anne McClintock furthermore argues that “[p]ost-colonial studies has set itself
against this imperial idea of linear time” (254). 8 It concentrates on the disengagement
7
In the essay entitled “When was ‘post-colonial?’Thinking at the Limit,” Hall discusses the troubles
and problems that the theorists encounter in the naming of the term “postcolonial” and its terrain by
attempting to define the relationship among colonial, postcolonial, and imperialism. For more detail,
please refer to Stuart Hall’s “When was ‘the Post-colonial’? Thinking at the Limit.”
8
Anne McClintock in “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Postcolonialism’” discusses the
inconclusive aspects of the term “post-coloniality.” Arguing that the term is trapped itself within the
concept of time, McClintock is convinced that “metaphorically, the term ‘post-colonial’marks history
as a series of stages along an epochal road from ‘the precolonial’ to ‘the colonial’to ‘the
post-colonial’— an unbidden, if disavowed, commitment to linear time and the idea of ‘development’”
(254). She moreover points out the pitfalls of the term by designating the global situation, and the
difference of various countries that are undergoing what is called “post-coloniality.” She also states that
when theorizing postcolonialism, gender problems surface without notice. And women, comparing to
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of the colonial condition, returning the voice and the right to the subaltern and the
marginalized, who were once muted to narrate their history and subjectivity. It
attempts to invert the perspectives of the Western world that saw the “Rest” as the
Other, allowing the emergence of third-world intellectuals to utter on beha lf of their
own nation or people.
Unlike the radical or even violent tendencies in the initial resistant movements
of postcolonial activists, a great deal of cultural and literary resistance of the
postcolonial realm is demonstrated by means of literary works. The emergence of
postcolonial literature in the past few years shows that literature has become a
“writing cure” for the formerly colonized subjects to express their discontent and to
regain what they have been deprived of in the years of colonization. The “writing
cure” enables writers of different ethnicities or of (pre-)colonized background to
document their personal experience or the communal histories of their once colonized
countries. The composition of postcolonial literary works thus functions as literary
resistance. It is the media for literature writers or critical theorists to imagine,
(re-)construct the oppressed stories of their own or of their forefathers, and to express
their opinions about the condition of the coloniality or postcoloniality.
Accompanying the movement of cultural decolonization, the literary resistance of the
postcolonial is to reclaim aut hority in the acts of narrating subaltern histories,
presenting and (re-)mapping geographical boundaries, and rebuilding traumatic
identities. Benita Parry, author of “Resistance Theory/Theorising Resistance or Two
Cheers for Nativism,” points out that “the project of a postcolonial critique is
designated as deconstructing and displacing the Eurocentric premises of a discursive
all the colonizers and the colonized, are the greatest victim of all. Pointing out the flows of the
developing thinking of postcoloniality, McClintock nevertheless urges for the proliferation of
innovative theories and a more comprehensive and well-structured theories in the realm of
postcolonialism.
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apparatus which constructed the Third World not only for the west but also for the
cultures so represented” (172). What Ondaatje attempts to overthrow in The English
Patient is precisely the fictional image that is planted on the subaltern characters.
Kip’s political and racial awakening, for instance, may be interpreted as the resistance
to the colonial gaze, which the Western hegemo ny fixes upon the subaltern or the
represented subject. Moreover, Parry also notes that instead of searching for the
“remote paternity, ” a postcolonial construction of the past should be “an imaginative
reworking of the process of métissage or an infinite wandering across cultures” (Parry
174). Hence, Ondaatje’s adopts Herodotus’s The Histories to elaborate the atmosphere
of artificial and fabricated histories.
For Almásy, history is “like the air we breathe, it enters (or interpellates) us
unconsciously, without our knowledge or attentive participation; it does the work
through books, all books” (Ismail 412). Said, however, mentions that history, or the
narrating of an alternative history, is the device for the postcolonial novelists to
reconstruct their past and thus to question the colonial way of documenting the past.
As Said writes, “[appealing] to the past is the commonest of strategies in
interpretations of the present. What animates such appeals is not only disagreement
about what happened in the past and what the past was, but whether it continues,
albeit in different forms, perhaps” (Said 1993: 3). Unlike the novelists of the
nineteenth century who celebrated Imperialism and Colonialism, and who, as Said
claims, exaggerated the almighty power of empires, and the religious, economic, and
political benefits of colonization to both the colonizing countries and the colonized
subjects, writers of postcolonial terrain write in the attempt to question the historical
value of colonization, and to reveal the unnoticed colonized subjects. In Culture and
Imperialism, Said designates the deeply rooted connections between novels and
imperialism. He suggests that the celebration of imperial expansion in the eighteenth
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and nineteenth century novels is ubiquitous and taken for granted. 9 Contending that
the novelists are the ones who grow seeds of imperialism in the minds of the mass
reading public, Said states that imperialism, in one way or another, flourishes on the
pages and in the imagination of the readers than in reality. Said claims,
I’m not trying to say that novel— or the culture in the broad
sense— ‘caused’ imperialism, but that the novel, as a cultural artifact of
bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other. Of
all the major literary forms, the novel is the most recent, its emergence
the most datable, its occurrence the most Western, its normative pattern
of social authority the most structured; imperialism and the novel
fortified each other to such a degree that it is impossible, I would argue,
to read one without in some way dealing with the other. (70-1)
Commenting on nineteenth century English novels, Said elaborates on the
deeply-bounded relationship between the art work and the imperial expansion. In the
postcolonial terrain, the rewriting of novels is thus prevalent in that they wish to
subvert not only the classical, but also the official history of Western hegemony.
Literary resistance not only concentrates on (re-)narrating histories, but that it
also attempts to (re-)map the geography of the once colonized territory, whether it be
the land or the body, and the identity of the colonized. Although the production of
identity is well-known to critics who are familiar with the postcolonial theories, 10 or
cultural studies, the definition of one ’s identity should not be conducted entirely in the
hands of the colonizing other. As Parry argues,
9
Novels such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Jane Austen’s
Mansfield Park, William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Charles Dicken’s Great Expectations, Joseph
Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim serve as examples to demonstrate the
emergence as well as the prosperous development in the eighteenth and nineteenth century England.
10
That identity is a production, constructed, told, spoken, not simply found. For more information,
please refer to Stuart Hall’s Questions of Cultural Identity (1996), and “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”
(2003).
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Anticolonialists writings did challenge, subvert, and undermine the ruling
ideologies, and nowhere more so than in overthrowing the hierarchy of
colonizer/colonized, the speech and stance of the colonized refusing a
position of subjugation and dispensing with the terms of the coloniser ’s
definitions. (176)
Europe’s fabrications of “Asian, ” for instance, is deflected and subverted by Asian
and Asian-American literary discourses. That “Asian identity” is the product of
refusing Europe’s gaze and returning its own anti-colonialist look. Hence “the modes
of subaltern colonial resistance, far from being demonstrated by forms and
vocabularies borrowed from the dominant culture, were rearticulations of pre-colonial
traditions of protest” (Parry 176).
Thesis Structure
In the first chapter of the thesis I discuss how the history of resistance is
(re-)constructed in Ondaatje’s The English Patient. The novel demonstrates
characteristics such as decentered subjects, repetitive narrations, and the disruption
and rejection of a single authoritative history, which are all inclusive in the main
concerns of postcolonial spectrum. In the novel the patient’s cherished book,
Herodotus’s The Histories, is presented by Ondaatje as a symbol of the combination
of fiction and history. It is also implied as the microcosm of the novel. Gathering from
primarily oral resources, that is, hearsays and stories, Herodotus records and accounts
an unofficial and fictional history in a similar manner as does the English patient in
recollecting his remembrances. Ondaatje, too, mimics the technique in composing the
“history novel,” that is The English Patient. Herodotus’s The Histories is thus in this
sense the model for the way history is reconstructed in both the patient’s
remembrances and Ondaatje’s novel. Ondaatje obtains his sources and inspiration of
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the novel from historical facts (the Second World War, the Crusaders in Italy, the
figure of Count Almásy in Royal Geographical Society, and his findings of the lost
oasis of Zezura and the cave paintings) and incorporates them with his imagination.
The novel thus is presented as the merging of fiction and history, in which fictional
and historical narratives coexist and parallel, and the history of resistance is
re-narrated in the novel.
Having discussed the temporal aspect of the novel, I broaden my discussion to
spacial aspect, concentrating on the text ’s mapping and remapping of a wounded
space, both geographically and physically. In Chapter Two I intend to problematize
the concept of boundary, discussing not only the patient ’s attempt to “erase the
nationhood,” but also to break of the boundaries of nation, geography as well as body.
The broken body and space is an evident motif in The English Patient. The patient ’s
burned body mirrors the ruined villa’s open-space, both suffering from the attacks of
the Second World War. The identity of the patient, not as a European colonist, but a
suppressed and injured Other, is also demonstrated by means of his wounded body,
which will be discussed in the Third chapter. The novel takes place at mainly two
locations, the broken and destroyed Italian villa and the boundless and limitless
Libyan desert, both signifying the renouncement of national as well as geographical
borders. It is also noticeable that in the novel, body is employed as a limitation and a
boundary The characters are imprisoned by the confinement of their bodies, such as
Hana’s long hair, which is shortened in order for her to be mentally liberated, or
Caravaggio’s chopped fingers, which signify the loss of his fixed identity. In addition,
the patient’s lack of a face to be gazed upon enables him to be liberated from his
identity as a Belgian, a spy, an adulterer, or simply a betrayer of both his allies and his
colleagues.
In the third chapter, I narrow down the topic to the representation of identity
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and the loss of identity. As the concepts of nationality, boundaries, and social
confinement are no longer stable in the wartime desert, identity, morality and national
borders in the novel become flexible and blur red. The patient’s identity, for instance,
remains mysterious and vague throughout the first and second chapters of the novel. It
is not until Chapter Three of the novel that Ondaatje reveals the possible identity of
the burned patient, but still confuses the readers’ acknowledgement of the patient’s
identity by means of elusive and fragmented imagery of both the patient’s stories and
the narrative of the novel per se. Physically, not only has he no face to be identified
with, the penis that demonstrates his gender has withered because of the burning and
is asleep “like a sea horse” (Ondaatje 3). Mentally, he has no desire to be
“categorized” as a subject of any nation, or of either side of the war. In a sense, war is
what sets him free from a fixed identity, but also what confined him to the state of
in-between.
Not only is the identity of the patient presented as a question, the identity of the
other characters, surrounding the patient, is constantly shifting and developing. That is,
the war that breaks the boundaries of nations and identities also brings the feeling of
lack for a definable identity, emotional dependence and for homeland (nostalgia). The
motif of desire is not only revealed in the relationship of love affairs, but also in the
father-daughter or mentor-pupil relations. Without the lack, there would be no desire.
Suffering from losses, the characters in the novel thus constantly desire and search for
compensations, such as Hana’s gradually recovering from her father’s death by taking
care of the burned patient who is of similar age as her father Patrick and of the same
suffering. Kip, however, develops the skill of adaptability to adjust the lack of living
as an outsider in Europe. According to Cook, “Kip is particularly adept at the art of
finding substitutes or replacements: he is able to ‘switch allegiances’ or ‘replace loss’
with ease” (Cook 1999: 39). The love affair between Hana and Kip thus may be seen
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as the replacement of Kip ’s need for the intimacy of a stranger that he once felt
comfortable with his ayah when he was a child. Similar situations of compensation
are also discussed in Chapter Three, in which other characters’ identity formations are
elaborated.
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Chapter One: (Re-)Telling History and Remembrance
“There seem to be no time there. Each of them has selected the most
comfortable of positions to forget time. So we will be remembered by
others.”
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient 280.
“How to write a new history? When [...] the only history is white” (Young 1990:
120)? The radical question that Robert Young proposes in White Mythologies is
answered, or at least attempted to be solved, by many ethnic or national critics and
literary writers who are dedicated to the unmasking or (re-)writing of their cultural
histories. Like many other literary works that spring from the critique of colonialism,
or the so-called post-colonial terrains, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient
attempts to overthrow the (Western) official history, allowing the subaltern and their
historical account to surface from the barriers of narration of historiography. The
temporal setting of the novel has strongly suggested the rebelling atmosphere of
postcolonialism. It is after the Second World War that decolonization takes place, with
the Eurocentric thoughts and disciplines, and their superior “forms of history” being
questioned and thus decolonized. In addition, Ondaatje’s disruption and rejection of a
single, authoritative history may be observed in the novel’s temporal-disordered
narratives, repetition and distortion, and finally the merging of history and fiction, of
which Herodotus ’s The Histories may best serve as the example of incorporating
indigenous oral mythologies and legends with the well-documented histories of
written facts. He demonstrates a sense of literary resistance on the pages of the novel.
Textualizing a world in which creative fiction and documented history are
interwoven into the novel, Ondaatje explicitly demonstrates the technique of
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history-telling that he borrows from Herodotus ’s The Histories. As the narrator of the
novel writes, the patient ’s copy of The Histories is “added to, cutting and gluing in
pages from other books or writing in his [Almásy’s] own observations— so they all
cradled within the text of Herodotus ” (16). Unlike modern historians, who are more
accessible to documentations of the past, those of ancient times in which no sense of
archeology or perhaps that of history is well-developed knew considerably little about
what had happened in the past, that is, the time before the existence of the historians.
Herodotus, however, did not seem to be bothered with the inaccessible past when
composing The Histories. According to James Romm, “[m]ost ancient historians,
beginning in the generation after Herodotus, solved the problem of the knowability of
the past by writing only about the events they themselves had lived through [...] with a
wealth of documentary evidence for their information” (Romm 7). Unlike most
ancient historians, Herodotus “alone explored an era well before his own birth, and
did so, for the most part, without the aid of written sources” (Romm 9). One cannot
help but questioning what it was that Herodotus gained from the knowledge of the
past to compose his book. The question is answered by Romm as he states that
Herodotus learned about the past by listening or documenting the tales, legends,
myths, or the dramatized facts that he was told. “[A]llow[ing] those stories to lend
shape and meaning to his narrative,” Herotodus composes what Romm calls the
“mystic history. ” Considering the readers’ responses to the authenticity of the text,
Romm furthermore refers The Histories to a text that is “based on a true story”
(Romm 5-11). In short, Romm counts The Histories as a documentation of
“fact-oriented” tales, much like Ondaatje’s The English Patient, in which no reader
needs to know how authentic the content of the text is as long as he/she enjoys the
process of reading.
Employing historical figures and events of the Geographical Society of Britain
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during the Second World War, Ondaatje indulges his imagination on the particular
incident of the 1939 desert expedition to search for the lost oasis Zerzura. At the very
beginning of the novel, he quotes a brief announcement from the Geographical
Society meeting in London at 194- in order to prove the existence of the figures that
he adopts in the novel, that is, the members of the Royal Sand Club, as well as the
death of Geoffrey and Katharine Clifton at Gilf Kebir. However, like Herodotus,
Ondaatje (re-)shapes the historical facts into fictional events, including the secret love
affair between Count Ladislaus de Almásy and Katharine Clifton, and the fictional
plane crash that caused the death of Geoffrey Clifton. Ondaatje’s adoption of the
historical materials and figures is similar to what Romm comments on Herodotus ’s
inventive attitude and technique in telling histories: “Histories may be his subject
matter, but his approach to that subject differs from that of historians as we know
them” (Romm 8). Based on the similar approaches to deal with histories, The English
Patient may be called a novel that is “based on a true story. ” Ondaatje’s merging
history into fiction helps to introduce doubts on the authenticity of history, and to
furthermore overthrow the so-called official historiography.
Contrary to the “official history” that is narrated and established by the
dominant class, the history of the repressed or of the subaltern emerges as a vital issue
in the postcolonial realm. In Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, Said proposes
the idea that the entire Oriental World is constructed under European thinking. The
argument trembles the Western academy, leading theorists to dig deep into the field
that are now called the postcolonial studies and Orientalism. Although Said is not the
first to discuss the discrepancies of ethnicities or the working system of the imperial
power structure, he, following the steps of Franz Fanon’s radical tendency toward
decolonization, and Michel Foucault’s theories on power and knowledge, develops his
critique of Orientalism. Said’s Orientalism unites and transcends Oriental studies in
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history, geography, and philosophies, bringing all Oriental studies into the realm of
the influence of power structure and hegemony. In short, Orientalism is the studies of
the relationship between “the Orient ” and “the Occident,” which is a relationship of
dominance, control, and of political and economical interests. Even when the
Occidental scholars show a great interest in or have mercy on the Orient, their
grounds of any reaction are very unlikely to be interest- free. The entire Western
discourse on the East is based on the Occident’s dominance over the ethnicity and the
land of the Orient as well as the possible interests that can be gained from it.
Although Said’s works are without doubt significant, they nevertheless arouse
various questions and further discussions. Robert Young, for instance, comments on
Said’s Orientalism in White Mythologies. He writes that “the analyses of Orientalism
force us to the recognition that all knowledge may be contaminated, implicated even
in its very formal or ‘objective’structures” (127), The question that follows is to what
extent other knowledges are contaminated. However, Young proposes that if all
disciplines are dominated by the Western hegemony, Orientalism should not be
immune from the contamination of Western hegemony. As Young points out,
Orientalism offers no alternative to the phenomena that Said criticizes, depriving the
entire Western academic circle of the ability to produce any discourse. Not only is it
not Said’s intention nor his duty to offer any alternative or workable critique that can
survive under the examination of Orientalism, Said ’s refusal to provide such an
alternative solution only strengthens his observation on the Western-dominated world
phenomena. As for critics who object Said’s Orientalism, a dilemma of whether a
solution is required or not is presented since “to provide an alternative to Orientalism
would be to accept the existence of the very thing in disput e” (Young 127). However,
such critique also produces a problem. It deprives the credibility and any fundamental
meanings of the existence of other knowledges. Thus the recognition of Orientalism
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would only overthrow the entire Western legitimate disciplines on the Orient. In
addition, another problem that puts the construction and authenticity of the Orient into
question appears when Said criticizes that the Oriental discourses, especially those
made by the early Orientalists, tend to construct the Orient by presenting it in images
and “visions ” rather than by allowing the Oriental subjects to narrate their own
histories in words and languages. The dehistorization of the Occident, according to
Said, deprives the Orientalists of the ability to see the World outside the West through
narrative. The object under their description and studies is merely the representation
of the Oriental world. However, if what Said says is correct, why should the object
under his discussions and analyses be the true Orient? Indeed, the question as to
whether there is a true Orient is presented by Young, who contends that “typical of
this kind of difficulty would be his criticism that Orientalism created an eternal
unchanging platonic vision of the Orient ” (Young 127-8).
Pointing out that the history of the Orient is either denied by Western hegemony
or presented by the “official history” of the Occident, Said in Orientalism also
encourages the (re-)construction of Oriental history. In the novel, however, the
presentation of the (oppressed) history is demonstrated by the subaltern’s pasts and
remembrances. By “subaltern” here I mean the four main characters in the novel who,
compared to the dominant Western hegemony that causes the Great War, are relatively
the sacrifice of the power wrestling of Western countries. According to Bill Ashcraft,
Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin in Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, the
term “subaltern” is first employed by Antonio Gramsci to “refer to those groups in
society who are subject to the hegemony of the ruling classes.” That is, groups that
are “denied access to ‘hegemonic’ power” (215). The term “subaltern, ” applied to the
Subaltern Studies group— which initially includes Ranajit Guha, Shahid Amin, David
Arnold, Partha Chatterjee, David Hardiman, and Gyan Pandey— in the postcolonial
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terrain takes on a specific meaning of the character, and the level of the oppressed
group in South Asia, which is determined by class, race, gender, and caste. The
Subaltern Studies group published five volumes of Subaltern Studies, bringing into
discussion the histories, politics, economics, and sociology of South Asia, especially
of Southern India. The group aims at distinguishing the circumstances, the political,
economic, and historical injustices that are done to the subaltern class, allowing them
to be liberated from not only the British colonizers, but also from the indigenous elites
of the country. As is observed by Ashcraft, Griffiths and Tiffin,
[t]he goals of the group stemmed from the belief tha t the historiography
of Indian nationalism, for instance, had long been dominated by
élitism— colonialist élitism and bourgeoise-nationalist élitism— both the
consequences of British colonialism. (Ashcraft et al 217)
Therefore, in the eye of the Subaltern Studies group, the history of India is practically
the history of the dominant class, which includes both the British colonialists and the
indigenous intellectuals. In other words, the historiography of India captured by the
dominant class of elitism and colonialism is merely another interpretation of a
colonized country that is muted to speak for its own. Such image and construction is
very likely to resemble the un-realistically oriental picture that Said attempts to reveal
in Orientalism. Like many postcolonial critics and theorians, the group concentrates
on rectifying the current situation, returning the subaltern class the voice and power to
utter their own history, that is, the history of the subaltern.
The attempt, however, gives rise to various responses and discussions. Among
them, Gayatri Chakeavorty Spivak delivers her significant viewpoints in the essay
entitled “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In her opinion, whether or not the subaltern is
able to voice is an essential and foremost question that members of the Subaltern
Studies group should ask. Designating the insufficiencies of Michel Foucault and
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Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of Western hegemonic Subjectivity and ideology,
Spivak problematizes the subjectivity of the subaltern by means of Marxist criticism
on Capitalism and Western economics. Unveiling the ubiquity of the global
situation— that is, the current situation of the dominant subject of the West, or “the
West as Subject”— Spivak points out that “some of the most radical criticism coming
out of the West today is the result of an interested desire” to disguise such a
situation, 11 such as the above two theorists, and most of the French intellectuals (271).
Spivak concludes in the first part of the essay, “[t]his S/subject, curiously sewn
together into a transparency by denegations, belongs to the exploiters’ side of the
international division of labor” (280). But for the French intellectuals, it is impossible
to realize the inter-connected relationship between Power and Desire that inhabits in
the transparent Western Subject, and in the construction of Europe’s Other. As she
points out,
It is not only that everything they read, critical or uncritical, is caught
within the debate of the production of that Other, supporting or critiquing
the constitution of that Other of Europe, great care was taken to obliterate
the textual ingredients with which such a subject could cathect, could
occupy(invest?) its itinerary— not only by ideological and scientific
production, but also by the institution of the law. (Spivak 280)
And it is such kind of transparence, or deliberate ignorance of Western Subject that
indulges European hegemony to construct the image of Other on behalf of the
subaltern, deepening the subordination of the subaltern.
However, as one of the critics who concentrates on analyzing the
11
By “desire” Spivak means the West’s desire to increase its interests in economics, political
dominance, and others that may be helpful in constructing and sustaining the sovereign position of
Western Subject. Among all the interests, Spivak, based her critique on a Marxist perspective, discusses
economical interests the most.
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(post-/anti-)colonial condition, Spivak, too, deviates from her own theory by adopting
the dominant language (English) and Western methodologies to utter the oppressed
condition of the colonized subjects, 12 including the gender difference in the
(post-/anti-)colonial discourse, one of her most concern issues. 13 One is inevitable to
question Spivak’s over-determinant answer as she adopts the Western methodologies
as the proofs that the subaltern cannot speak while pointing out that other critics, such
as Foucault and Deleuze, are fallen into the cognitive failure in adopting Western
methodologies in the attempt to narrate the (post-)colonial condition. What Spivak
discusses in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is not necessarily the subaltern’s ability to
voice political concerns, but a more fundamental definition of a subaltern identity.
The reason why the subaltern cannot speak is because of their subaltern identities.
Spivak believes that the identity of the subaltern lies in its difference from the
dominant class. Such difference is caused precisely because that the subaltern cannot
speak for he/her own while the dominant class can. To be a subaltern is to be
continually suppressed by the dominant, ruling class. That is, if a subaltern speaks or
if his/her voice is successfully heard, the identity of the subaltern is not applied onto
him/her. Thus, Spivak claims that the subaltern cannot speak.
However, such a complete negation of the possibility that subaltern is heard is
over-determinant. To follow Spivak’s definition of subaltern identity is to agree that
the entire critique of post-colonial discourse is useless in attempting to voice the
oppressed and the marginalized communities. If indeed it is in vain in attempting for
the subaltern to be heard, Spivak and other postcolonial critics’ works are functionless
12
Rejecting the possibility that the subaltern can speak, Spivak nevertheless continues to comment on
the (post-)colonial condition not only by means of the dominant language, but also Western theories by
Marx, Gramsci, Foucault, Derrida and Lacan. She combines various disciplines and methodologies into
her unique style of reading without offering any solution to the subaltern condition.
13
In “Can the Subaltern Speak,” Spivak discusses the women in the colonized situation, pointing out
the omission of the colonized female, who are eternally under the hegemonic power of both
Colonialism and conventional social system. The colonized women, according to Spivak, are doubly
colonized by men and foreign power.
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in describing the postcolonial conditions. Although post-colonial discourse is perhaps
loose and problematic, as many critics has suggested, in the beginning of the
discourse formation, it is not as incorrigible as what Spivak suggests, nor useless in
voicing for the subaltern. Ashcroft et al comment in Post-Colonial Studies that “in
most cases the dominant language or mode of representation [of post-colonial
discourse] is appropriated so that the marginal voice can be heard” (219), which is
precisely what Spivak herself and many other critics do. 14 The emergence of the
discourse itself, too, is the demonstration of how the subaltern is heard little by little.
The definition of the subaltern subjects that are widely discussed by the
Subaltern Studies Group and Spivak is applicable to the four main characters in The
English Patient. In the novel, the counter position of the Western Subject and the
oppressed Other is observed in the circumstances between the Great War and the four
personas, who dwell temporarily in the broken Italian villa in order to wait for the end
of the War. Kip, for instance, is the most obvious persona who is dominated and
pinned down by the Sovereign Subject of Western hegemony. He is the Sikh who is
not only subaltern to India but also to British imperialism. As for the other three
characters, although the ethnicity of Hana, Caravaggio, and Almásy seem to rule them
out of the definition of subaltern, since they belong to the white dominate circles, they
are nevertheless dominated by the force of the war, and rendered subaltern in the
novel. On the one hand, the nationalities of Hana and Caravaggio are both of Canada,
which is the former colony of French and the British Empire, and after the war the
subaltern country of the United States in terms of its economy. The protagonist
Almásy, on the other hand, is a Hungarian whose nation is tormented and constantly
dominated by foreign political power, such as Russia, and who, according to the novel,
14
Critics such as Said and Homi Bhabha who share different ethnic backgrounds but adopt the
dominant language of English and European methodologies to narrate the postcolonial condition.
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receives his education in the foreign land of England. He not only is treated but also
actively perceives himself as an unassimilated other. The subaltern quality of the
characters moreover may be detected by virtue of their oppressed condition in the
novel. They are in a sense deserted in the villa, subjected to the hegemonic power of
the Great War. Striving to live through the remains of the war, the four characters are
rendered powerless, becoming the “subject[s] of insurgency” (Ashcraft et al 219).
However, considering the relationship between the four main characters and the
other subordinate personas that appear in the margins of the novel, one may observe
the author ’s attempt to give the subaltern voices while denying the dominate party the
position to speak for their own. Ondaatje not only narrates and re-narrates the history
of medieval and modern Europe, but also tangles the remembrances of the subaltern
personas that disturb the official history of Europe with the fragmentary yet intensive
memories of the four characters. Unlike what Spivak claims as the silenced subaltern,
the characters in the novel are given chances, under Ondaatje’s depiction, to narrate
their personal or national histories. The Subaltern Studies Group and Spivak’s essay
also demonstrates a clear sense of class consciousness, which is observable in The
English Patient as well. Comparing with the four subaltern characters that are active
in the novel, the subordinate characters, such as Lord Suffolk, Katharine, Madox, and
other members of the Sand Club, are relatively the dominated party who are contrarily
denied voices of their own. The class consciousness in the novel is deliberately
reversed and reconstructed by Ondaatje. For instance, both aristocrats of England,
Lord Suffolk and Katharine, the two characters who may be rightfully referred to as
secondary characters in the novel, speak only through Kip the Sikh sapper and the
English patient who is in fact a Hungarian. Although Lord Suffolk and Katharine both
play significant roles in the novel, they live like phantoms in the memories of Kip and
the English patient. What is more ironic and subversive is that in The English Patient,
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all the Englishmen die. Not only do Lord Suffolk and Katharine die miserably in the
novel, Madox, Almásy’s English friend, also commits suicide in the church, in which
he pulls out the gun and fires a shot into his mouth. The class consciousness of the
dominant British and the subaltern subjects are subverted in terms of Ondaatje’s
adopting four subaltern subjects as his main characters and of his favoring the
subaltern over the dominant class. In the novel the subaltern are thus granted the
chance to narrate their histories while all the Englishmen exist in the memories of the
four main characters.
(Re-)Constructing an alternative history for the subaltern by means of adding
fictional elements into historical documentation or by merging the past with the
present, Ondaatje depicts a fictional world that is chained by both the histories of
European wars and the broken memories of the four characters. An instantly
observable example that proves Ondaatje’s merging of past and present is the
resonance between the medieval war that had taken place in ancient Florence and the
Second World War that took place in modern Italy. Apart from the invented love affair
of Almásy and Katharine that is entirely made up by Ondaatje, another inventive
instance of fusing fiction into history and past into present is the sequel of the fatal
incident of Michaelangelo Caravaggio the Renaissance painter and the man whom he
killed in a dispute of a tennis match. According to ArtBook: Caravaggio, the
Renaissance painter Caravaggio may have accidentally killed a young man named
Ranuccio Tomassoni on May 29, 1606.15 Told by Ondaatje, the most mysterious
murder that takes place in the history of art world has a sequel in the novel in which
the Canadian spy Caravaggio is caught and has his thumbs chopped off by a German
officer Ranuccio Tommasoni, whose name is that of the murdered young man in 1606,
15
According to the documentation of ArtBook: Caravaggio, a brawl or perhaps a duel, possibly
because of a cheating incident in rackets game, occurred in the Campo Marzio that led Caravaggio to
fatally injure his rival gang Ranuccio Tomassoni (96).
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veering the difference of one more M and without an S. Reuniting the two historical
figures with different names, Michaelangelo Caravaggio as David Caravaggio, and
Ranuccio Tomassoni as Ranuccio Tommasoni, in different time and space, Ondaatje
designs the plot and justifies the victim to revenge the murder. Instead of indicating
any significance, such trick is but a means to toy and distort history, implying the
depreciation of any official Western history.
Intertextuality with intentions or specific purposes is common in postcolonial
writings. 16 The purpose of such rewriting is to overthrow the imperial histories or
ideology, presenting an alternative or a subaltern voice. Such rewriting may be
observed in literary works such as J. M. Coetzee’s Foe, a postcolonial response to the
colonial story of Robinson Crusoe by the eighteenth century novelist Daniel Defoe,
and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, the story of Antoinette Cosway, who is Bertha
Mason, the Jamaican mad wife of Edward Rochester in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre,
and Ondaatje’s The English Patient, the rewriting of Kipling’s Kim and perhaps of E.
M. Foster’s A Passage to India. These examples clearly aim at deconstructing the
imperial ideology by rewriting or giving an alternative narrative or perspective on the
well-known literary works that celebrate or assert Imperialism or Colonialism.17
Ondaatje’s rewriting of Kim may be observed in the various similarities and
differences that Ondaatje designs in order to challenge the previous text. As Said
points out, it is inspiring to see “Kipling (few more imperialist and reactionary than he)
16
That is, to invent a sequel to a certain historical event or to produce a new story that is based on
well-known literary works.
17
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is considered the pioneering literary work that encourages its English
readers to broaden their territory beyond the border. The slave trading and the character Friday in the
novel also imply that European ethnicity and civilization is superior than the rest, and is bounded bring
a better future to the rest of the world if become dominated. Coetzee’s Foe thus concentrates on
deconstructing the foundation of such imperialist ideology, aiming to de-Foe. Rhy’s Wide Sargasso Sea,
on the other hand, forces readers to examine the public’s attitude toward ethnicity in the eighteenth
century by presenting an alternative possibility, allowing the subaltern to narrate and construct their
histories. It is because of the novel that the mad woman in Jane Eyre is able to construct an alternative
possibility, instead of merely been perceived as a mentally unstable, and violent color woman.
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[writes] his novel Kim not only depend[s] on a long history of Anglo-Indian
perspective, but also, in spite of itself, forecast the untenability of that perspective in
its insistence on the belief that the Indian reality require[s], indeed [besought] British
tutelage more or less indefinitely” (Said 1993: xxi). Ismail also states that “Kim is a
novel of conquest; it is the pre-eminent novel depicting and naturalising the conquest
of India within the canon of English literature; thus its selection by The English
Patient” (414). Ondaatje chooses to write his own work as a response to Kim because
of such colonial consciousness that springs from the novel. The opening sentences of
Kim, for instance, clearly suggest that India is a conquered country:
He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on
her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher— the Wonder House, as
the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam- Zammah, that
“fir-breathing dragon, ” hold the Punjab; for the great green-bronze piece
is always first of the conqueror ’s loot.
There was some justification of Kim— he had kicked Lala Dinanath’s boy
off the trunnions— since the English held the Punjab and Kim was
English. (7)
From Kim’s actions, that is, an Englishman who disregards the municipal orders and
sits “astride the gun Zam- Zammah on her brick platform,” the famous gun that
whoever possesses it owns Punjab, his attitude of contempt toward the government of
India is clear. Kipling’s intention of acknowledging his implied readers (British
metropolitan public) the empire’s complete dominance over India is demonstrated as
well. Ismail writes, “there [Kim], all India is quite literally put on display for the
metropolitan reader [of British] ” (414). The mysterious yet somewhat dangerous
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journey into the unknown land also appears in Kim as the discoveries of the Other. 18
Like Joseph Conrad, who invents the protagonist Marlow to venture into the so-called
Dark Continent and leads the readers into the “wild, uncivilized, and dark Africa,”
Kipling also presents the figure Kim to take on a journey into the Northern India with
a lama. Like the writers’ “discoveries” of the mysterious Other, such adventures of
foreign lands penetrate the non-West, inviting the West to practically stick their
national flags into the soils of the alien lands and to claim them its own.
What Ondaatje does to reverse the colonial tendency in Kim is demonstrated in
various aspects. First, the resemblance of the name Kim (Kimball O’Hara) and Kip
(Kirpal Singh) highlights the similarities and ironies of the two characters whereas
Kim is the English (who, as readers soon come to know is an Irish) who travels in
India, Kip is an India (who, as readers come to realize, is in fact, a Sikh) who joins the
British bombing unit and serves in England and Europe. Although their names are
similar, Kim and Kip are in many ways contradicting each other. As Ismail observes,
“where [Kim] is British who successfully passes for Indian, [Kip] is an Indian who
tries, but fails, to be accepted by the English” (418). In addition to Kip, Hana is also
compared to Kim because, like O’Hara who takes care of the lama in Kim, she takes
care of the dying patient in The English Patient. Moreover, contrary to the very
beginning of Kipling’s colonial novel “[h]e sat,” that of Ondaatje’s The English
Patient, as Ismail calls the postcolonial novel, starts with “[s]he stands,” designing to
reflect the masculine world of Kim and to designate the atmosphere of instability in
the postcolonial spectrum. Furthermore, Ondaatje rewrites Kipling’s novel in that he
subverts the traditional rule of placing the hero as the discoverer/explorer. In Kim,
O’Hara is without doubt the hero who discovers and introduces India to the readers of
18
The journey into the mysterious third-world continent is another motif that is frequently employed
in colonial writings as it is used in Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness.
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Britain. In The English Patient, however, the desert of Libya and the rest of Africa
that Almásy introduces to Hana and the readers of the novel are already put into
words and documentations by Herodotus. Here, in spite of being the hero of the novel
and the ethnographer of the Royal Geographical Society, Almásy is not the explorer,
nor the discoverer of the land of which he produces maps (Ismail 413-20).
The English Patient overthrows the conventional narrative of the subject/object
positions. In the novel the English patient is rescued by the Bedouin, and kept alive so
that they can use him to identify the guns and bullets that scattered in the desert
during the wartime. Once the patient has completed his job, he is no longer useful to
the Bedouin and is handed over to the British. Although in the novel the Bedouin are
still silenced, they are, compared to other subalterns in colonial novels, the ones who
have the power, the power to not save the English patient, or even to kill him. They
are also the party who possesses knowledge as the patient is brought back to life not
by Western medicine but by the tribal medication. The Bedouin are depicted here as
both knowledgeable and of authority. In addition, rather than attempting to represent
the subaltern community whom Ondaatje does not know much, he has returned the
Bedouin the power of silence. The narrative object turns from the silenced Bedouin to
the patient who possesses knowledge while the subject who usually does the narration
is rendered vulnerable in such a state that his life is in the hands of the object. In short,
the power structure of subject and object in Western narrative is revered by Ondaatje
in depicting the situation of the protagonist’s stay with the Bedouin. Unlike the
natives in Kim, who are portrayed as clearly dominated and understood by the
colonialists, the Bedouin in The English Patient is depicted as a mysterious tribe, who
possesses knowledge yet unknown to the outsiders. As the patient, a knowledgeable
man who claims to “ha[ve] information like a sea” in him, and is entered by history,
wonders to himself, “what great nation had found him” (Ondaatje 6). Although the
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Bedouin are muted in the pages of the novel, their silence takes on a more different
meaning than those of the subaltern who are deprived of the right of speech in
colonial novels. They silence by will, not by force. As Ondaatje notes, “the Bedouin
silenced themselves when he was awake” (6). The Bedouin’s silence furthermore
demonstrates that the subaltern narrates their history in their own languages, and is
unknown to the outsiders, including the patient, the author, and the readers.
Apart from overthrowing the credibility and justice of Western history, the
novel also integrates the past and the present, disrupting the traditional linear
development of narrative that has dominated Western literature. Such narrative
technique also appears in other postcolonial novels. Among them, Arundhati Roy’s
The God of Small Things is perhaps one of the most evident illustrations. 19
Considering The English Patient, one may find that introducing a great deal of
European history, whether it is of art or of war, into the novel, Ondaatje seems
deliberately disorganize its presentation, allowing the past (the histories and the
remembrances) to haunt the present. According to Novak, The English Patient is “a
text about the trauma of History. Examining the cultural trauma of the World War
Two— not so much the ‘truth’of what happened, but instead its place today in cultural
imagination— the novel probes how the present confronts the unimaginable and the
silences of the past” (Novak 211). In doing so, Ondaatje brings out a great deal of past
in Europe in order to contrast the present, such as the last mediaeval war that fought
in Italy in 1943 with the ending of World War Two (Ondaatje 69-72). The
interweaving narrative of the ancient war and the present situation of World War Two
creates a sense of synchronicity, leading readers to experience the authenticity of
19
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things describes the chain reaction that occurs because of an
unfortunate accident. The novel reverses the temporal sequence by narrating the fatal incident in the
beginning of the novel (Sophie Mol’s funeral), and goes back to tell the story before the accident takes
place while interweaving the past with the present, creating an alternative temporal universe that
distinguishes the novel.
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historicity and the presence of wars. Mingling the past into the present, Ondaatje
repeatedly reverses temporal sequences, foretelling the endings ahead while revealing
the events later. For instance, readers are foretold the future developments of the
characters, such as Kip, who becomes a dentist and gets married in India, Hana and
Caravaggio, who return to Canada and go on with their lives, and the patient, who
eventually ceases to exist.
Moreover, in the novel the present is tangled with the past. Often the
description of the present is interrupted by the sudden remembrance of the past while
the actions of the remembrance are again cut off by the present actions. Such
disruption happens when Caravaggio tells the story of how he comes to lose his
thumbs. The story is continually interrupted by Caravaggio ’s own narrative disorder,
Hana’s contemplation of both the patient and Caravaggio, the environmental and
historical description of the broken villa, Caravaggio’s memory of seeing Hana as a
young girl, and finally, the appearance of a stray dog. The simple story eventually
lasts for pages in fragments for readers to realize how and why his fingers are
chopped off. The telling of the past thus integrates into the present, triggering the
motions and certain points that draw the diversion of the present back to the telling of
the past. Another obvious instance of such integration of past and present occurs when
the patient starts to recount his memories before the accident. It starts with the forth
section and lasts till the end of the novel, haunts, and is haunted by, the present, that is,
his remaining days in the villa. Such interaction, however, is mutual. The present
actions and its occurrence, too, are disrupted and triggered by the past. For instance, a
scene in which the patient is taken to identify and demonstrate the variety of guns that
the Bedouins gather in the desert, the patient suddenly recollects his childhood
memories of the little card game that he used to play with his aunt on the grass of her
lawn. And thus the fusing of past and present:
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And he [the patient], now in this desert, was sane, with clear thought,
picking up the cards, bringing them together with ease, his grin flung out
to his aunt, and firing each successful combination into the air, and
gradually the unseen men around him replied to rifle shot with a cheer.
(Ondaatje 21)
We may notice here that the integration of past and present, which is already too
deeply fused to separate from each other in terms of the description, the scenes, and
similar actions, are not only inseparably tied together, but also create an alternative
space that is both the desert and the green lawn, both the card game and the shooting
demonstration. 20 Such combination of pieces of fragmentary memories serves the
purpose of disrupting the present, allowing the past to emerge and be re- membered
again. As Novak states, “the fragmentary memories in The English Patient endeavor
to supplement the past with the present and the present in the past” (209). In other
words, the pieces of present and past are complementary to each other. However, the
past that is presented by the memories of the characters does not reveal what it really
is. They are the interpretations, or as Novak terms, the “translations ” of the
unrepresentable past. 21
Memories as the interpretations of the past means that memories cannot
represent what the past really is like. In accounting the past, the characters in the
novel tend to remember, or sometimes exaggerate, the splinters of details that make
impressions on them. These glimpses of the past thus perform different functions and
serve various purposes for characters who drown themselves into the well of memory.
Novak argues that “traumatized by the past, the characters of this novel seek to cope
20
Such alternative space that is created because of the compression of time is discussed in detail in
Chapter Two.
21
For more details on Novak’s adaptation of Benjamin ’s theories on translation, please refer to
Introduction.
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with their traumatic experience by drawing the event into a narrative space that will
contain and position the past” (207). For Kip, the flashbacks of the memories are
nostalgic remembrance, reminding him of his nation far away in Asia, and his new
founded family in England, who, unfortunately, disappoints him at the end. For Hana,
the memories of her childhood and of her traumatic experience as a wartime nurse
that are mostly triggered by Caravaggio’s appearance and the patient’s memories
serve as both the nostalgic memories and the remembering cure. For the patient, the
attempt to remember the past, or in part, the repeatedly production of the past, serves
to (re-)construct a position in which he feels comfortably hiding inside. The
characters’ remembrance furthermore overwrites the collective memories of the war
and the histories of previous literary works. Hana, for instance, spontaneously writes
down how she feels about Caravaggio on the blank pages of The Last of the Mohicans.
Later she “closes the book and then walks down into the library and conceals it in one
of the high shelves” (61). The textualization of her memories produces a history of
her own that is written down on top of other histories, the histories of the last of the
Mohicans. The patient, on the other hand, combines the historical documentation and
his personal histories on the pages of Herodotus’ The Histories. The stories and
histories that the patient tells are in a part personal experience that he writes down in
the commonplace book, and the documentations in The Histories or “the information
glued in from other books” (58). In other words, the characters document their
personal histories on the margins of the other subaltern histories, and against the great
history of World War Two. History and remembrance thus tangle together, moving the
story forward while luring more memories to come to the surface of the present.
Said once comments in Culture and Imperialism that “stories are the heart of
what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become
the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their
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own history”(xii). Narrating an alternative history and highlighting the remembrance
of the subaltern, Ondaatje subverts the dominant position of Western hegemony,
allowing the subaltern and their stories to be the prime concerns in The English
Patient.
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Chapter Two:
(Re-)Mapping a Wounded Geography and Broken Body
“He rides the boat of morphine. It races in him, imploding time and
geography the way maps compress the world onto a two-dimensional
sheet of paper. ”
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient 161.
As is observed by Ashcraft, Griffiths, and Tiffin in Post-Colonial Studies: The
Key Concepts, the concept of place in post-colonial writing is a “constant trope of
difference,” “a continual reminder of colonial ambivalence, of the separation yet
continual mixing of the colonizer and colonized” (179). It is the most evident
demonstration of the invasion of imperialism and colonialism that bring about the
appearance of displacement, exile, and the ownership of land and territories. After
dealing with the fragmentary history and remembrance in the previous chapter, this
chapter aims to excavate the wounded geography and broken body, which are
demonstrated ubiquitously in the novel. First of all, I concentrate on solving the
problems of how and why the space, place, and landscape in the novel are presented
as a wounded and traumatized territory; secondly, I examine how the broken body, too,
is seen as a map of resistance and why it is in need of healing. Before the discussion
of wounded geography and broken body, the term “deterritorializaiton” is borrowed
here to provide an explanation for traumatization in The English Patient. Originally
employed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature,
the term “deterritorialization” comes handy in the discussion of Franz Kafka’s literary
works, considering his frequent literary theme of metamorphosing his characters into
animals, and the qualifications of why his works are classified as minor literature in
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terms of his social and personal background, and the Prague German he adopted in
writing.
According to Deleuze and Guattari’s definition, minor literature, such as
Kafka’s works, qualifies the following three characteristics: First, the language of
minor literature “is affected with a coefficient of deterritorialization. ” As a Czech Jew,
Kafka finds it impossible to not write at all since his national consciousness needs to
exist by means of literature. But to write in German, or to write other than in German
are also, according to Deleuze and Guattari, another two impossible tasks as Kafka’s
literary language is not standard German, nor can he write other than in German. He
is thus trapped in the deterritorialized situation of adopting Prague German as his
language, which only “appropriate for strange and minor uses.” The second
characteristic of minor literature is that “everything in them [minor literatures] is
political. ” Since the minor literature exists because of deprivation, of language,
culture, or political autonomy, its contents, however irrelevant they are with the
political situation of the social background, inevitably reflect or reveal certain
political consciousness. The third characteristic of minor literature is that in it
“everything takes on a collective value.” Resonating the second characteristic that
everything in minor literature is political, the third characteristic tells the readers that
the collective value is often of political or national consciousness. As Deleuze and
Guattari note, “the political domain has contaminated every statement,” and that it is
literature who “finds itself positively charged with the role and function of collective,
and even revolutionary, enunciation. ” Concentrating on the deterritorialization of
Prague German, Deleuze and Guattari hence place Kafka’s literary works under the
classification of minor literature (Deleuze & Guattari 12-27). 22
22
Deleuze and Guattari in “What is a Minor Literature?” furthermore contends that the
deterritorialization of Kafka’s literary works is also demonstrated in terms of his literary themes, such
as metamorphosis , and of his expressions. 15-46.
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Demonstrating the theme of de- and re-territorialization, Ondaatje’s The English
Patient is qualified as a work of minor literature. Although his fluent, even beautifully
constructed English may be questioned as to whether his language is a
“deterritorialized language ” or not, the novel does fit the profiles of other two
characteristics that Deleuze and Guattari defines. The work connects the characters to
political immediacy while at the same time takes on a collective value. The characters
of the novel are all connected to the Second World War in one way or another.
Moreover, the novel sends out the messages of anti- imperialism and decolonization so
strong that it is difficult not to contemplate the author’s personal background.
Ondaatje’s application of such standard and beautifully written English furthermore
demonstrates the deterritorialized condition of postcolonial writing. That is,
presumably, the author has to abandon his native tongue and composes his work in the
dominant language of English. Imagine how many people would read the novel if it
were written in India language(s) or Dutch. Deleuze and Guattari contends that “a
minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a
minority constructs within a major language ” (Deleuze & Guattari 16). The statement
fits perfectly Ondaatje’s works and his personal background as a diasporian of
multiple ethnicities who was born in Sri Lanka, growing up in the Netherlands,
studying in Britain, and lives now in Canada.
However, a different point of view is presented by Louisa Renza. Discussing
whether or not the works of the nineteent h century American novelist Sarah Orne
Jewett are a minor literature, Renza questions the definitions of minor literature that
are set up by Deleuze and Guattari. In “A White Haron” and the Question of Minor
Literature, she claims that Deleuze and Guattari “privilege only a certain kind of
minor literature, that which like Kafka’s is in the process of interrogating the oedipean
tropes of major literary praxis but which the major language or canonical critical
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codes can misrecognize as major according to the ir own standards” (34-5). The
“minor literature” that Deleuze and Guattari prefers is what Renza terms as “a major
‘minor literature.’” However, works such as Jewett’s “A White Haron” does not
conform to Deleuze and Guattari’s definitions of a minor literature. It is not “a major
‘minor literature,’” but what Renza calls a “‘minor’ minor literature,” the literature
that is minor and insignificant in everyway, and is not recognized by canonical
standards in every perspective. As Renza observes, “the deterritorialized literature”
that Deleuze and Guattari have in mind “requires the preexistence of major literature
or language it can deconstruct— or rather its criticism can deconstruct— so as to
expose minor literature’s heretofore underground political ‘intensity’” (34). While the
statement hints the incapacity of Jewett’s literary works in manifesting the
deterritorialization of major literature or language, it mirrors perfectly Ondaatje’s
intension of interrogating the colonial criticism and Imperial thoughts in The English
Patient. Renza’s observation also reveals Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of minor
literature, which resonates deeply the ideas of re-and de-territorialization. Hence, she
concludes that
Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of minor literature, then restrictively
includes those “schizo” or marginal text which they can wrest from the
reterritorializing practices of established critical codes they associate with
the major language and which they can redefine as examples of a
politically subversive minority praxis. (Renza 35)
While it may not be just to exclude Jewett’s “A White Haron” as a minor literature in
terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s definition, their definition answers to Ondaatje’s The
English Patient in that the text suggests a strong sense of de- and re-territorialization.
Borrowed by post-colonial discourse, the term “deterritorialization” portrays
one of the most fundamental concepts of colonialism, which is to deconstruct and
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reconstruct the colonized geography, transforming the conquered land into the
subaltern territories. One may say that while imperialism is the action of an empire’s
expanding its dominating territory, colonialism is the consequence and the practice of
imperialism. 23 As Said observes, such expanding action means “thinking about,
settling on, controlling land that you do not possess, that is distant, that is lived on and
owned by others” (1993: 7). Although direct colonialism has ceased to exist in our
time, the impact and profound influence that caused by imperialism and colonialism
lingers on, creating a sense of cultural atmosphere that clouds the once colonized
territories. Territories here refer to the land, the body, and the traumatized souls of the
colonized subjects. Postcolonial discourse and literature, thus, in its attempts to
deterritorialize, and sometimes reterritorialize, the boundary and geography made by
colonialists, narrates and unveils the traumatized atmosphere. The wounded
geography, the colonized subjects, and the body, for instance, are what postcolonial
discourse and its literary works endeavor to unravel or heal in the literary resistance
against the imperial and colonial violence.
Arguably, the motif of deterritorialization in Ondaatje’s The English Patient is
demonstrated by the violent destruction of Europe and the characters. Adopting
wartime Europe, the center of the imperial hegemony, as the prime site of the novel’s
background, Ondaatje hints at the postcolonial concept of deterritorialization, which is
not only rebelling but also subversive. Contrary to the conventional imagery of
Europe that is depicted as a prospective, an advanced and civilized continent in the
colonial novels, the Europe in The English Patient is portrayed as a desolate and
damaged earth in which the atmosphere of death lingers on and stinks. 24 The wartime
23
Here I adopt Said’s definition of the terms “imperialism” and “colonialism.” As he comments in
Culture and Imperialism, “‘imperialism’means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a
dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory; ‘colonialism,’ which is almost always a
consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory” (9).
24
In colonial novels such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Brontë’s Jean Eyre, Austin’s Mansfield Park,
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Europe, as Ondaatje writes, “is still terrible out there. Dead cattle. Horses shot dead,
half eaten. People hanging upside down from bridges. The last vices of war.
Completely unsafe” (29). Dragging the superior Europe down to the same level as the
colonized continents, Ondaatje erases the differences of the colonizing subjects and
the colonized objects. He presents the vivid scene of an outcast and wretched Europe
that is no more different from the colonized land. That is, the burning Asia in Kip ’s
imagination, or his hometown Punjab in India, where people need to wash their hands
constantly for sanitary problems. Contrasting the wartime Europe that suffers from the
Second World War with the pre-war and peaceful desert in the patient’s memories,
Ondaatje furthermore dissolves the demarcation between the two lands, implying the
previous standards of what is perceived of Europe and Africa. In the patient ’s
memories and the surrounding that he situates, the so-called “dark Africa” appears to
offer more comforts than what Europe can do. The desert in his remembrance is
peaceful, quiet but alive (the Bedouin doesn’t talk much, but they take care of the
injured pilot) while at the same time Europe is burning with fires of anger and greed,
attempting to stretch its claws onto Africa and Asia.
The traumatized space in the novel is exemplified by the Libyan Desert that
suffers from the pillage of European empires during the Second World War, the
severely damaged Italian villa of San Girolamo, and finally, the wounded bodies of
the characters: the patient ’s burned body, Caravaggio ’s incomplete fingers, and Hana ’s
cut-off tonsils and long hair. Illustrating the miserable condition of the wretched earth,
the traumatized souls and bodies, the author begins the process of reterritorialization.
That is, the construction and (re-)presentation of the imaginary geography in the novel.
The demarcation of locality no longer exists in the novel. It is replaced by spaces of
or Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the contrast between the progressive and flourishing European
continent and the savaged, uncivilized Africa, Caribbean islands, and America is either strongly
implied or laid out there clearly on the pages.
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infinity: the desert is without boundaries, the villa without walls, the two sites
merging into one in the patient’s narratives and memories without differences, and the
homelands and the settling spots where Hana and Kip dwell become distant- less in
their narration and memories. The act of deterritorialization and reterritorialization,
however, extends beyond spatial aspects. It also includes the process of
de-colonization and the re- making of the cultures of the colonized subjects. In The
English Patient, the deterritorialization is demonstrated by means of the un-definable
territories of the desert, the infinite-extended villa, and the characters’ broken bodies.
The open space of the Villa San Girolamo, where the four characters temporarily
shelter from the war, implies both the postcolonial rejection of violent setting of
boundary as well as the presentation of injury. Not only are the rooms of San
Girolamo decorated with paintings of natural environments and landscapes, the villa
itself, suffering from the devastation of the war, is knocked down several walls and
forced to open into the landscape of the surrounding. The originally fixed and
confined space thus becomes infinite. Furthermore, the dwellers, bewitched by the
artificial paintings of landscapes and the nature that is introduced into the room, such
as the breezes and rain and darkness, are lead to believe that the rooms are a part of
the landscape while the natural surrounding a part of the broken villa. The narrator of
the novel portrays, “there seemed little demarcation between house and landscape,
between building and the burned and shelled remnants of the earth. To Hana the wild
gardens were like further rooms” (Ondaatje 43). It is a space where “[d]oors open into
landscape. Some rooms had become an open aviary” (Ondaatje 13).
What is at work here is the concept of locality: place and space. Discussing one
of the challenges that Postcolonialism and cultural studies confront, Lawrence
Grossberg, in “The Space of Culture, the Power of Space,” predicts that “[t]he new
global economy of culture entails a deterritorialization of culture and its subsequent
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reterritorialization, and challenges culture’s equation with location of place” (169). In
the article, he defines the term “place” as “the sites of fullness, identity, ‘the inside’
and human activity” while “space,” “the emptiness between places in which nothing
happens except the movement from one place to another” (175). According to
Ashcraft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, the term “place” is hardly an issue or a separate topic
from “time” until the intervention of colonialism, as is the separation of “space” from
“place.” It is Colonialism’s intention to turn uncolonized “spaces” into colonized
“places” by means of cartography and naming, such as the British Empire’s design to
map and territorialize the desert. In the novel, the British’s imperial conquest is
detected by means of “the Sand Club ” and the Royal Geographical Society, which is
“a prime mover in the imperial conquests of the ‘undiscovered’regions of the world,
and it is significant that as Kipling’s Kim illustrates (the cover of the Head of the
Secret Service in that text, Creighton Sahib is that of the Director of the General
Survey of India), the colonial mapper and surveyor was frequently the most
ubiquitous figure of imperial control” (Ashcraft et al 33-4). Around the time of the
Second World War, cartography plays the role of the spokesman of Empire. As the
narrator of the novel states:
There is, after Herodotus, little interest by the Western world towards the
desert for hundreds of years. From 425 B.C. to the beginning of the
twentieth century there is an averting of eyes. Silence. The nineteenth
century was an age of river seekers. And then in the 1920s there is a
sweet postscript history on his pocket of earth, made mostly by privately
founded expeditions and followed by modest lectures given at the
Geographical Society in London at Kensington Gore. (Ondaatje 133)
Under the disguise of the thirst for knowledge, Royal Geographical Society
legitimates the invasion, cultural as well as economical, of the European hegemony,
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taking the “undiscovered land ” under the wings of the empires, categorizing foreign
and unfamiliar territories onto the maps made by the colonizing countries.
Mapping, furthermore, is in fact the act of textualizing substantial and solid
spaces into symbolic and abstract graphs onto pieces of paper. In Michael Ondaatje’s
The English Patient, John Bolland suggests that “[p]ostcolonial fiction differs from
colonial in its more critical awareness of the role of mapping the history Empire” (45).
He also comments that “[t]he naming of places and features grants title and
controlling knowledge ” (44-5). By naming and renaming the indigenous geographies
with foreign names for European powers to direct their influences onto native
continents, 25 cartography is rightfully perceived as the act of allegorical exploitation
and inscription, and “literary mastery” of power and control. Ironically, as a dissident
of the Royal Geographical Socie ty, which is purposefully an imperial and
national-oriented institution, Almásy firmly believes that none of the members of the
Sand Club cares about nationality: “We were German, English, Hungarians,
African— all of us insignificant to them [the Bedouins]. Gradually we became
nationless. I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states” (Ondaatje 139).
Almásy’s attitude of disbelieving nationalities or loyalty furthermore demonstrates in
his handing the British maps to the Germans in order to exchange a ride that would
assist him in rescuing Katharine.
The concepts of space and place that are widely employed in the novel are
discussed by Arif Dirlik, who defines the terms “place” and “spae” in “Place-Based
Imagination: Globalism and the Politics of Place”:
Space is product, the geographical equivalent of the commodity; place,
on the other hand, is product and work, with the uniqueness of the work
of art or the craft of the artisan. Space and place stand in opposition to
25
Such as the lost oasis of Zerzura or the city of El Taj that are mentioned in the novel.
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one another, as the opposition of different kinds of labor (and different
stages in the production of space). (18)
However, contending the two terms from a capitalist point of view, Dirlik suggests
that “places come to attention at the moment of their extinction” (Dirlik 35). With
globalization, the blurring of places and spaces becomes obvious and inevitable. The
deterritorialization of places is exemplified by the diasporians all over the world and
the postcolonial atmosphere that has been going on for the last decade. Discussing the
challenges that Postcolonialism and cultural studies confront, Lawrence Grossberg,
too, predicts that “[t]he new global economy of culture entails a deterritorialization of
culture and its subsequent reterritorialization, and challenges culture’s equation with
location of place” (169). In the article, Grossberg defines the term place as “the sites
of fullness, identity, ‘the inside’ and human activity” while space, “the emptiness
between places in which nothing happens except the movement from one place to
another” (175). The process of turning spaces into places in The English Patient is not
only demonstrated but reversed when Ondaatje turns specific places such as the villa
or the site of desert that is perceived as a fixed target into unbounded spaces. Dirlik
argues that “[p]lace is a location [...] where the social and natural meet, where the
production of nature by the social is not clearly distinguishable from the production of
the social by the natural” (Dirlik 18). In this case, the place, “where the social and
natural meets,” is without doubt the villa, the wretched building that opens itself to the
scenery around it, while the space the desert, the construction of nature. The sense of
emptiness and infinity is revealed and stressed in Ondaatje’s describing San Girolamo
and the Libyan Desert. Almásy speaks of such feelings: “in the desert it’s easy to lose
a sense of demarcation” (Ondaatje 18). Like the patient, Hana, too, feels that the
boundaries of the villa and the gardens outside disappear as “[s]he turns into the room
which is another garden— this one made up of trees and bowers painted over its walls
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and ceiling. The man lies on the bed, his body exposed to the breeze” (Ondaatje 3).
In addition to revealing the sense of infinity, the space that is depicted in the
novel brings out “the layering effects” of histories and remembrances. That is,
histories enter everything, including spaces and bodies. Like the overwritten
inscriptions on a palimpsest, the memories of the past (re-)emerge in the midst of the
wounded spaces. The desert, for instance, is possessed by the histories of water. From
the beginning of the novel, Ondaatje has hinted the motif of water by suggesting that
reading the novel is like sinking into the “well of memory” (Ondaatje 3). The imagery
of water continues to haunt the desert of the present. As the narrator of the novel
describes, “[h]ere in the desert, which had been an old sea where nothing was
strapped down or permanent, everything drifted” (Ondaatje 22). Water, although not
visible, is everywhere. It is in the cave of the swimmers, in the semen of the boy who
dances till his ecstasy, and in the sea of fire and yellow sands which Almásy falls
burning into. All he could think of then was, “I must build a raft ” (Ondaatje 18). The
memories of water are repeatedly spoken of and cherished in the novel: “[i]n the
desert you celebrate nothing but water” (Ondaatje 23). Like the histories of the
pre-colonial construction and culture that are lost but its remembrance cherished,
water symbolizes lack and desire for someone or something, and is placed into
imagination. Although uprooted from the surface of the earth, water remains a shadow
that haunts the inhabitants and the landscape. It also haunts the readers’ imagination
as it haunts the characters’remembrances. In the desert, it is “the exile, carried back in
cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth” (Ondaatje 19). Even
the narrator records, “today the caravans look like a river” (Ondaatje 19). In the villa,
the water is soaked into the wet chairs and dump bookshelves and the moist air that
lingers on in the air of the villa. But no visible sight of water is described until the
heavy rain that brings Kip to the villa, the man who in one way becomes the savior of
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Hana and the patient.
Indeed, the imagery of water has been an essential element in the novel, as the
patient says, “[s]ome books open with an author’s assurance of order. One slipped
into their waters with a silent paddle” (Ondaatje 93, emphasis mine). Resonating the
image of well at the beginning of the novel, in the scene when Kip invites an old
mediaevalist of Oxford colleges to see the church frescoes, he hoists himself into the
dome of the church of Arezzo, and is “aware of the depth of thus church, not its height.
The liquid sense of it. The hollowness and darkness of a well” (Ondaatje 72).
Although readers are led to imagine a dry desert and a villa that runs out of tap-water,
they are nevertheless constantly reminded of the lost water that existed long ago in the
cave paintings of the desert, or on the water marks of the floor of the broken villa. The
remembrance of water furthermore extends to more than the two sights. Hana, for
instance, remembers the story about water and piano when she plays the half-broken
piano in the villa: “In Canada the piano needed water. You opened up the back and left
a full glass of water, and a month later the glass would be empty” (Ondaatje 63). In
the villa, however, water reappears as Kip arrives, reviving the traumatic souls of the
broken characters. The moisture of the villa thus reflects the dryness of the desert,
suggesting emotional revival of the characters from the exhausting experience of the
war. By the end of the story, the patient, too, is eager to have rain on his charred and
blacken body. But for him, water not only functions as the revival of spirit and
emotional trauma, but also serves as a reminder of what/who he desires.
In addition to providing comforts for the damaged and traumatic souls, water
also symbolizes the lack and desire. Katharine, for instance, is the figure whom
Geoffrey and Almásy both desire. She is a woman who never fits into the desert but
stays only in the attempt to experience Almásy’s passion for the dryness and
boundless of the desert. She has “grown up within gardens, among moistness [and
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who is] always happier in rain, in bathrooms steaming with liquid air, in sleepy
wetness” (Ondaatje 170). Almásy remembers bathing with Katharine, washing the
desert sand off his ears in his apartment in Southern Cairo. The remembering of water
is transformed into desire. As he notes,
In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover’s names, are carried blue
in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence. A woman in
Cairo curves the white length of her body up from the bed and leans out
of the window into a rainstorm to allow her nakedness to receive it.
(Ondaatje 141)
The bridge between desire and space indeed is affirmed by the imagery of water. It
not only symbolizes the forbidden and transgressive love affair between Almásy and
Katharine, but also moisturizes the transcultural and transnational relationship
between Kip and Hana, breaking the spatial limits of geography and body. Kip, as is
mentioned earlier, appears in the stormy night, bringing rain and water to the villa and
to Hana. Out of her curiosity and later the affections for Kip, Hana revives herself and
walks out from the trauma. The love affair of Kip and Hana is of benefit to both of
them. For Kip, it is the practice of intimacy with strangers that he— as a diasporic
subject— relies on. For Hana, it is the beginning of a relationship that eventually
storms her out of the emotional trauma.
The remembrance of water in the desert furthermore resonates the history of the
medieval war that was fought a century ago on the same land of Italy where the four
characters dwell temporarily. Ondaatje juxtaposes the past and the present that
happened on the same land, both the desert and the broken villa resemble a palimpsest,
an effective symbol that demonstrates how colonial invasion erases the prior
construction of the land and culture, presenting it as empty, ready to receive the
inscriptions of the foreign hegemony. The body, too, demonstrates similar
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characteristics in remembering the past. Like the desert and the villa that are engraved
with traumatic histories and personal memories, body is another space that records the
wounds of resistance. Ashcraft, Griffiths, and Tiffin mention in The Postcolonial
Studies that “the body is a crucial site for inscription” (183). In The English Patient,
the sights and records of wounds and mutilations are everywhere, physical and
psychological. The body is the container of stories and histories. The English patient
says that human beings are in fact “communal histories, communal books” (Ondaatje
261). As he contemplates,
We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have
swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of
wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden
in as if caves. I wish for this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I
believe in such cartography— to be marked by nature, not just to label
ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings.
(Ondaatje 261)
The body is the space that documents and narrates personal histories while the land
the communal histories. The charred body of the patient, for instance, reveals and
reminds him of his past. The vaccination scar on Katharine ’s shoulder that Almásy
loves brings him back to the past to “witness” Katharine’s childhood as he “[saw] the
instrument scratch and then punch the serum within her and then release itself, free of
her skin, years ago, when she was nine years old, in a school gymnasium” (Ondaatje
158). The crippled hands of Caravaggio also functions as a mark and as a remainder
of what he has experienced. In the novel the main characters’ broken bodies are the
vivid documentations of their personal histories. Hana cuts off her long hair to
strengthen the determination of her indifference towards the dying soldiers while
Kip’s long, black hair not only declares his origin, but foretells the failure of his
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attempt to mingle with the British.
Both the land and the body are portrayed as broken and wounded. The “list of
wounds” that Almásy receives from Katharine exemplifies the violent and intense
love affair:
The various colors of the bruises— bright russet leading to brown. The
plate she walked across the room with, flinging its contents aside, and
broke across his head, the blood rising up into the straw hair. The fork
that entered the back of his shoulders, leaving its bite marks the doctor
suspected were caused by a fox. (Ondaatje 153)
The various injuries that he receives since the underground love affair symbolize
Almásy’s opening up for Katharine and the compromises that he makes for accepting
her into his life. Almásy’s wounds are the deterritorialization of his body, which is
open in order to accept the entrance of Katharine: “she has taken the blood from his
hand when he cut himself cooking for her. Blood. Tear. He feels everything is missing
from his body, feels he contains smoke” (Ondaatje 157). The relationship between
Almásy and Katharine are contrary to those portrayed in the colonial novels, in which
women, and in some cases the aboriginal lands, are the ones that are (forced to)
“open” physically to men or the invasion of Colonialism. This is another subversion
of postcolonial rewriting of colonial literary works. Like the desert that are de- and
re-territorialized by European cartographers, or the non-Europeans that are colonized
by the Europeans, Almásy’s injured body that wounded and opened by Katharine is
the demonstration of physical deterritorialization. Almásy, in his own words, “fall[s]
in love and be disassembled” by her (Ondaatje 158). However, readers are not
informed of Katharine’s injuries. In this secret love affair, it is Katharine who
dominates the entire relationship. As Almásy notes, “[h]e cannot alter what he loves
most in her, her “lack of comprise” (Ondaatje 157). She is, throughout the entire love
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affair, physically intact, until the night she ended the relationship, “her head sweeps
away from him and hits the side of the gatepost” (Ondaatje 158). But Almásy
suppresses the thought of drawing her into his arms. He thinks to himself that they
“have separated already into themselves now” (Ondaatje 158).
In addition to the wounds that are given by Katharine, Almásy/the patient later
experie nces severer injures because of the plane crash. Owing to the burning, the
patient has no recognizable facial features, nor prestige muscles that produce facial
expressions. Unlike the body of the beautiful actor in Minghella’s cinematic version,
the incomplete and wounded body in the novel becomes a broken space that is no
longer under the dominance of the patient, but awaited for the colonization and the
reterritorialization by other characters. Introducing broken images of the space, both
the land and the body, Ondaatje highlights the motif of deterritorialization that is
prevalent in postcolonial literature. The purpose of demonstrating the images of
wounded land and body is to present the condition of the colonial subject’s
deprivation. The “castrated bodies” of the four main characters illustrate the ir
decentered and displaced conditions, physically and psychologically. Hana’s
remembrance of being “surrounded day and night by their [the dying soldiers]
wounds” (Ondaatje 49), and her refusal to “never [look] at herself in the mirror again”
(Ondaatje 51) exemplifies the symptoms of the colonized subjects who are victimized
and traumatized by the colonial force. In a scene in which Hana feels disgust when
her hair touches the blood of the dying soldiers, she
picked up a pair of scissors out the porcelain bowl, leaned over and began
to cut her hair, not concerned with shape or length, just cutting it
away— the irritation of its presence during the previous days sill in her
mind— when she had bent forward and her hair had touched blood in a
wound. She would have nothing to link her, to lock her, to death.
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(Ondaatje 50-1)
Caravaggio has also observed Hana’s broken and tired-out body, noting that “her body
had been in a war and, as is love, it had used every part of herself” (Ondaatje 81).
The characters’ bodies not only demonstrate histories of traumas and resistance
but also reveal a positive sign of healing as they move into the villa. During the days
in the ruined shelter, Caravaggio, for instance, has “loosened his body and freed his
tenseness, so he seemed bugger, more sprawled out in his gestures. Only his silence of
movement remained. Otherwise there was an easy inefficiency to him now, a
sleepiness to his gestures” (Ondaatje 265). The villa that merges space and place into
one location provides a shelter for the traumatized characters to escape from the war
and the brutal reality. The inhabitants of the villa are all displaced and decentered
individuals who begin “shedding [the] skins ” of earlier selves, and find new identities
through the relationships they develop in their Tuscan refuge.
As is demonstrated in The English Patient, the space of geography and body
weavers a spatial history that demonstrates the interrelationship between space and
history. Ashcraft, Griffiths, and Tiffin comment that “although the body is a text, that
is, a space in which conflicting discourses can be written and read, it is a specially
material text, one that demonstrates how subjectivity, however constructed it may in
fact be, is ‘felt’ as inescapably material and permanent ” (1994: 184). Bolland also
suggests a characteristic in both The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion, that the
“inscription [of the body] is not an instrument of power-knowledge, but part of a
necessary exchange in which an individual loses his or her previous self and finds a
new identity through relationship with another” (Bolland 39). Ondaatje weaves space
and history into a single novel that documents and narrates the resistance and the
condition of the marginalized and subaltern characters, placing them under the
traumatized land, trapping them inside the wounded bodies, but direct them to come
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58
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Chapter Three: Unmasking the Representation of Identity
“So a man in the desert can slip into a name as if within a discovered well,
and in its shadowed coolness be tempted never to leave such
containment.”
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient 141.
In the previous chapter, the deeply-bounded relationship of body and identity is
stated and discussed. In this chapter, the topic of identity will be explored in terms of
its representation and mutability, which are demonstrated by the four main characters,
and their interaction with the big environment of wartime Europe. Stuart Hall in
“Cultural Identity and Diaspora” gives two definitions to the term “cultural identity. ”
First, he defines cultural identity “in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective
‘one true self,’ hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed
‘selves,’which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common” (234). The
second definition of cultural identity is “a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being.’
It [cultural identity] belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something
which already exists, transcending place, time, history, and culture” (236). Apparently
preferring the second definition, Hall believes that cultural identity is formed within,
rather than in history that has to be “rediscover. ” As he asserts, “like everything which
is historical, they [cultural identities] undergo constant transformation. Far from being
eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of
history, culture, and power” (236). The characteristics of mutability, uncertainty, and
representation of a cultural identity are strongly asserted in the statement,
demonstrating Hall’s believes that identity as “unstable, metamorphic, and sometimes
even contradictory” (233). Hall thus suggests that instead of thinking identity as a fix
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entity, one should contemplate a cultural identity as a “‘production’ which is never
complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside,
representation” (234). Hall states that identity is constituted “not outside but within
representation” (245). That is, identity is never certain, and is always wrapped within
the masks of representations. In the case of the novel, the identities of the characters
are disguised under the representations of the patient ’s nameless and nationless
condition, of Hana’s shorted hair and indifferent attitude when attending the dying
soldiers, of Caravaggio’s various disguises in penetrating the enemy’s secrets, and of
Kip’s deceiving himself to be able to befriend with the colonizers.
In “Trade and Power, Money and War: Rethinking Masculinity in Michael
Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” Susan Ellis announces that “[r]elationship is the key
to identity through names” (28). The problems of naming in the novel resonates a
great deal of how identities are perceived, either by those who name, or by those who
are named. The motif of naming is hinted as Ondaatje employs the mapmaker as his
protagonist. The novel documents that “[t]here was a time when mapmakers named
the places they traveled through with the names of lovers rather than their own”
(Ondaatje 140). The lost oasis of Zerzura, for example, is “named after the bathing
woman in a desert caravan” (Ondaatje 153). But unlike other mapmakers, the
protagonist renounces the right or the dictatorial power to give names to any localities
or be named by anyone or any community. Thus, Almásy demonstrates of how one
comes to lose one’s identity by refusing to be named or labeled. As readers may have
detected, the English patient has endeavored to erase his name and nationality
throughout the novel. At the beginning of the novel, Hana asks the patient to identify
himself:
Who are you?
I don’t know. You keep asking me.
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You said you were English (Ondaatje 5).
The identity of the patient is fabricated from the beginning of the story. He has
deliberately invented a new identity only to escape from the old one. The “new
identity, ” to be precise, is no identity at all. When asked by Hana about his nationality,
he neither answers, nor denies Hana ’s assumption. When interrogated by Caravaggio
about his profession as a cartographer and a spy before and at the beginning of the
war, the patient, too, gives no response except the repeated babbling that he keeps
rambled on, about his love affair with the woman who only later to be identified as
someone else’s wife. When admiring the magnificent scene of the desert and the
exotic names of the places in Africa, he declares, “I didn’t want my name against such
beautiful names. Erase my family name! Erase nations. I was taught such things by
the desert” (Ondaatje 139). His choice of being freed from a fixed identity and a name
renders him nameless and nationless. Almásy’s attitude of rejecting a name or a
belonging results from his objection of the concept of ownership, which Ondaatje
explores by means of naming and desire. Contradicted to the general colonists and
imperialists, Almásy has always hated the concept of owning or being owned by
someone or something, which reflects his resentment in naming.
He perceives naming as a political act of empowerment. Katharine and Almásy
once ask each other what they hate most. While she says “a lie,” he replies,
“ownership” (Ondaatje 152). During a fight, Katharine accuses Almásy of being
inhuman and insensitive: “You slide past everything with your fear and hate of
ownership, of owning, of being owned, of being named” (Ondaatje 238). But slowly,
like most men and women who are in love, Almásy becomes possessive about
Katharine and her body. However, Katharine does indeed allows Almásy the
ownership at the end when she lies in the Cave of Swimmers, asking him to “[k]iss
me and call me by my name ” (Ondaatje 173). She has, willingly or not, “offered parts
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of [her] body” to Almásy, as he has to Katharine (Ondaatje 156). She has allowed her
lover to take ownership of Katherine ’s shoulder, “not husband’s” but Almásy’s. For
Katharine, the importance of names takes on a different meaning. Unlike her lover,
Katharine longs to be remembered by and have a name that translates into her identity.
Rather than enjoying the sense of losing one’s nationality, ethnicity, and any of the
social relationship with others, even responsibility, that is, losing one ’s existence, in
the boundless desert, she prefers to have a proper burial at her hometown when she
dies and a tomb with her name carved on it. Her valuing the identity of nationality and
ethnicity is observed. As the narrator describes, “[s]he would have hated to die
without a name. For her there was a line back to her ancestors that was tactile,
whereas he had erased the path he had emerged from. He was amazed she had loved
him in spite of such qualities of anonymity in himself” (Ondaatje 170).
Although tempted to understand and join Almásy’s passion for the desert,
Katharine is an entirely different character, who loves desert because it takes away
reason and fixity, replacing it with mutability and uncertainty. The desert liberates
Almásy from what he perceives as representations of boundaries and burdens. As he
admits, “I wanted to erase my name and the place I had come from. By the time war
arrived, after ten years in the desert, it was easy for me to slip into across borders, not
to belong to anyone, to any nation” (Ondaatje 139). Ironically, the name of Almásy
that he so desperately wish to get rid of not only pins him under a certain
representation (a Hungarian, a member of the Royal Geographical Society) but also
brings fatal consequence to his lover Katharine, who lies in the Cave, waiting for his
return. Traversing three days from the desert in order to ask for help, Almásy, instead
of giving Geoffrey Clifton’s name, or that of Katharine’s own, misjudges and reports
his Hungarian name, which sounds like German, to the English officers. He is thus
taken away as an enemy, a German, and denied any request, which results in
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Katharine ’s death.
The identification of the character Hana is also related to naming. Before the
appearance of Caravaggio, Hana’s acquaintance back in Canada, Hana is identified
not with her name, but as “the nurse” or “the woman” in the first chapter of the novel.
As the story develops, readers soon detect how Ondaatje not only delays keeps the
heroine’s name in suspense in the first chapter, but also presents her as endeavoring to
cast away her own identity because of the trauma that she has experienced in the war.
Traumatized by the horrid scenes of the war and the tragic loss of her father, lover,
and consequently her unborn child, Hana withdraws into her inner world, refusing to
face herself, physically or psychologically. For Hana, the identity, as a daughter
without father, and a woman without lover and child, is a wound that she resists. She
cuts off her hair, puts on some soldier’s tennis shoes, and changes into a poker face in
order to escape from all the details that may do more damage to her soul. In the villa,
she puts away all mirrors so that she wouldn’t have to face herself. With the same
skill, Caravaggio and Kip too, are at first introduced as “the man with bandaged
hands” and “the sapper, ” or “the Sikh” until they meet each other and the other
characters in the villa. Kip’s name, in particular, resonates the topic. Before joining
the British bombing squad, he was the second son to a traditional Indian Sikh family
who is to be a doctor in the future. Then the situation changes when he arrives in
England. His family name as well as first name is erased from him, and replaced from
Kirpal Singh to simply Kip. As Bolland argues, Kip ’s “collaboration in the Western
project to delineate name and so possess the unmapped desert has resulted in the
obliteration of his own features, the map of his identity” (Bolland 32). The sapper has
willingly turned himself into an identity-blurred subject, who is neither an Indian nor
an Englishman, but the subaltern subject who strives to be included in the dominant
class. Furthermore, Kip ’s allowing himself to be named after Kip suggests the
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Englishmen’s taking control over him, the colonial subject. It is only after hearing the
news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the sapper rejects the
nickname and readopts his Indian name as Kirpal Singh. Commenting on the subject,
Ellis has commented that “Ondaatje thus suggests that allowing oneself to be named,
and the creation of a sense of self that goes with it, can be a political act of
empowerment” (28).
To emphasize the characteristic of mutability, Ondaatje puts the names of the
characters into questions ; the cultural identity of the four characters is thus placed into
suspense and trials. Resonating Hall’s argumentation that cultural identity is
constantly under process and influence of other individuals and the bigger
environment, the relationships of the characters are not only interrelated but also
shape and form their identities. As is observed by Ellis, the connections of the
characters who get tangled in the webs of love and desire repeat a certain triangle
pattern. The connections of Geoffrey/Katharine/Almásy, Candaules/Candaules’s
queen/Gyges, and finally the patient/Hana/Kip are not only related but also evidently
similar. Insinuating Geoffrey’s pride in showing off Kathatine’s beauty, she chooses to
tell the cautionary tale of Candaules and his queen after their supper as her
entertaining performance to warn her husband’s behavior. “Are you listening,
Geoffrey?” she says. “Yes, my darling,” he replies (Ondaatje 232). Ironically, the
telling of the story motivates Almásy’s feelings for Katharine, and begins the pursuing
of Candaules’s queen. As Almásy recalls, “[t]his is the story of how I fell in love with
a woman, who read me a specific story from Herodotus ” (Ondaatje 234, emphasis
mine). Although Almásy realizes that perhaps the story is read with no other intention
than to Hana’s husband, “a path suddenly revealed itself in real life” (Ondaatje 234).
Almásy thus transforms himself into Gyges who murders Candaules the King and
takes the queen as his lover.
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However, the triangle relationship of the patient/Hana/Kip that shapes the
characters’ identities interactively is unlike the prior ones. The triangle is both hinted
and destructed early in the novel when Kip decides to disconnect the patient’s hearing
aid, crossing over the symbolic barrier of the patient in order to approach and hold
Hana in his arms at the other side of the bed. Unlike the prior stories in which the
usurpers (Gyges and Almásy) take over the woman by force or without the cons ent,
Kip in this triangle relationship is recognized as the “successor” of the patient. The
relationship between the patient and Kip is that of a father and son. Discussing the
painting of David and Goliath with Caravaggio, the patient states that “[y]outh
judging at the end of its outstretched hand. The judging of one’s own mortality. I think
when I see him at the foot of my bed that Kip is my David ” (Ondaatje 116). Thus
taking Hana away from the patient is like taking the daughter away from her father.
Regarding such politics of power exchange, Ellis claims that “Ondaatje creates a
rightful sense of power changing hands as a ‘New Age’ (234) begins, by filling the
novel with stories of the new man replacing the old ” (Ellis 34). In the novel it is easily
to find numerous evidences of “power changing hands,” such as Candaules the King
and Gyges, David and Goliath, Herodotus, “the father of history, ” and Almásy, Lord
Suffolk and Kip who takes on his job after his decease, and finally the patient and Kip.
The important message here lies in the simple statement in Herodotus ’s The Histories,
“So the king is killed. A New Age begins” (Ondaatje 234).
The relationship of the four dwellers in addition, is built by virtue of how they
shape and form the identities of each other, presenting them as how they perceive
each other. In the eyes of each character, the patient transforms, or is shifted into the
position of either an erudite scholar, a loving and caring father figure, or a shapeless
and scheming traitor. Almásy is depicted as a man who is without a face to be gazed
upon or talked to, and is unable to make any facial expressions because of the burning
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damage. All there is on the face are his deep grey eyes that constantly wavers its gaze
at the distant and illusionary desert. Not only has he no name to be identified with, the
memories and the tales that he tells are fragmentary and inconsistent. In spite of
Caravaggio’s attempt to uncover his identity, the mystery of the patient ’s identity
remains unraveled unt il in the latter part of the novel when the whole picture of the
past gradually emerges and connects to the memories that he tells the other residents
of the villa. But even then, in most conditions, the patient’s identity is constructed in
the gaze and the expectations of the other characters. His lost of identity continually
serves to fill out the lack and the trauma of the other characters. For Hana who loses
her beloved father, lover, and an unborn child, the elderly yet fragile patient fills out
the positions of a respectful father, an adored lover, and a child who is in need of
constant care and attention. As the narrator describes,
There was something about him she wanted to learn, grown into, and hide
in, where she could turn away from being an adult. There was little waltz
in the way he spoke to her and the way he thought. She wanted to save
him, this nameless, almost faceless man. (Ondaatje 52, emphasis mine)
According to Caravaggio, Hana has, for some reasons, “tied herself to a corpse” that
lies upstairs in the villa (Ondaatje 45). However, as he observes, Hana doesn’t “love ”
him. She “adore[s] him” (45). The reasons that she intensively feels with the patient
lies not purely on the affections between a man and a woman, but also on Hana ’s
thirst to borrow the patient’s empty identity in order to fill her lack.
As Bolland writes, “[t]he anonymity of the patient’s blackened exterior
becomes an emptiness which the others try to fill through projections of their own
needs” (34). For Hana, the patient is both the fragile and the sacred figure who is in
need of rescue, and the wise old scholar whom she may learn things from. Washing
his body, Hana “knows the body well, the penis sleeping like a sea horse, the thin
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tight hips. Hipbones of Christ, she thinks. He is her despairing saint” (Ondaatje 3).
Meanwhile he is the one who “has information like a sea” in him. He is the one who
tells her the stories from Herodotus’s The Histories, the enchanting love story
between Count Almásy and Katharine, and also the one who motivates Hana’s studies.
She is amazed at his knowledge yet feels pity for the broken and withering body. He
is, in short, an idol for Hana to worship and adore, and to establish her identity by. It
is because of his fragile state that Hana ’s role as an indispensable caretaker is secured.
She is significant because the patient’s life is in her hands. Unlike her father Patrick,
her anonymous lover, and the dying soldiers from whom she develops the sense of
insignificance toward herself, the patient is still barely alive, as if hanging on the
margins of life and death just for her. It is thus her task and her salvation to help the
patient from burning in pain and a miserable death. Thus, it is the sense of necessity
and the thirst for the patient ’s knowledge that allows Hana the illusion of
responsibility toward the patient. Facing other dying soldiers, Hana, however, has an
entirely different attitude. As she complains,
[w]ho the hell were we to be given the responsibility, expected to be as
wise as old priests, to know how to lead people towards something no
one wanted and make them fell comfortable. I could never believe in all
those services they have for the dead. Their vulgar rhetoric. How dare
they! How dare they talk like that about a human being dying. (Ondaatje
84)
She refuses to be conceived of as the figure of a wise old priest, and thus turns to the
patient for shelter. The relationship between the patient and Hana is thus in a sense
mutually beneficial. That is, the patient exchanges his knowledge, or that of
Herodotus’s or other literati, for a smooth death while the nurse gains psychological
comforts by taking care of the old, wise priest.
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Similar situations, of a persona finding compensation from other characters,
may also be observed in the interaction between Hana and Kip. Kip is accustomed to
strangers’ intimacy and in the habit of locating his identity as well as finding comforts
not from affections of his own blood, but from the intimacy of strangers, such as the
father-son, or mentor-disciple relation between him and Lord Suffolk, and later with
the patient, the mother-child intimacy with his childhood ayah (Ondaatje 225-6), and
finally the intimacy with a foreign woman, Hana. As Hana observes, “The man has
grown up an outsider and so can switch allegiances, can replace loss” (Ondaatje
271-2). The scene in which Kip gazes across the patient’s bed at Hana exemplifies his
desire: “If he would walk across the room and touch her he would be sane ” (Ondaatje
113). Kip ’s identity is established on top of his desire for and interaction with a
stranger. During the marches in Italy to dismantle bombs, Kip even finds comforts in
thinking of Queen Sheba, the murals that he inscribes in his mind:
The young Sikh sapper put his cheek against the med and thought of the
Queen of Sheba’s face, the texture of her shin. There was no comfort in
this river except for his desire for her, which somehow kept him warm.
He would pull the veil of her hair. He would put his right hand between
her neck and olive blouse. (Ondaatje 70)
Imagining the texture and the details of the facial expression of the Queen of Sheba,
Kip feels relaxed as if the figure in the mural has actually transformed itself into a real
woman in front of him. Comforted by her company, Kip thus forgets the unpleasant
situation that he is in.
The affections and the desire for intimacy with a figure in the mural resonates
what Rufus Cook comments in “Being and Representation. ” He contends that the
formation of identity is influenced not only by the other characters but also by the
artifacts and literary works in the novel. The paintings and the status of Western
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mythologies, as Cook observes, appear to “provide means of [Kip’s] self-definition”
(35). In a scene in which Kip spends the night in the city of Naples with eleven
sappers before the suspected citywide explosion, the Sikh enters a chapel of Rosary,
finding comforts among three statues, who are in the pose of a conversation. As far as
Kip considers, “they are company” (Ondaatje 279) to keep him from solitude. Staying
close to the statues, Kip lies down on the floor in order to find the intimacy of these
strangers. He realizes that if he is going to die, he has at least found these “parental
figures,” and can feel “relax in the midst of this mime of conversation” (Ondaatje
280). Hence, being around the presence of these figure, Kip is “relieved to be sleeping,
the luxuriousness of such a thing” (Ondaatje 280). The process of self-definition
continues to work when Kip imagines the three figures giving credits to Kip ’s job in
finding the bombs and approvals in this Indian boy:
The tableau now, with Kip at the feet of two figures, suggests a debate
over his fate. The raised terra-cotta arm a stay of execution, a promise of
some great future for this sleeper, childlike, foreign born. The three of
them almost at the point of decision, agreement. (Ondaatje 281)
This, of course, exists only in Kip ’s imagination. But observing the peaceful facial
expression, the large yet gentle gestures of these three statues, or simply being in their
company enables Kip to face the possible chance of dying after few hours time.
Like the compensational desire that one finds from other characters, works of
art, such as the three statues, perform similar function for the other characters as well.
Almásy for instance, is enlightened with the possible love affair with Katharine
because the story of Candaules the King and Gyges that Katharine chooses to read
from The Histories. Inspired by a story as well, Hana reads Kipling’s novel Kim to
sort out, or attempts to define, the relationship among Kip, the patient, and herself.
For instance, when Hana watches Kip sitting by the bed of the patient, the scene
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seems to her “the reversal of Kim. The young student was now Indian, the wise old
teacher was English” (Ondaatje 111):
And in some way on those long nights of reading and listening, she
supposed, they had prepared themselves for the young soldier, the body
grown up, who would join them. But it was Hana who was the young boy
in the story, And if Kip was anyone, he was the officer Creighton.
(Ondaatje 111)
Reading the novel, Hana not only identifies herself as one of the characters in Kim,
but attempts to define the relationship of the others according to that of the characters
in Kim. Thus when Kip appears in the villa, Hana feels as if he has stepped “out of the
fiction. As if the pages of Kipling had been rubbed in the night like a magic lamp. A
drug of wonders” (Ondaatje 94). Meanwhile, the patient realizes that Kip is the
successor of himself, or a younger version of himself, by mediating David
Caravaggio’s painting, David with the Head of Goliath. The patient says, “Youth
judging age at the end of its outstretched hand. The judging of one’s own mortality. I
think when I see him [Kip] at the foot of my bed that Kip is my David ” (Ondaatje
116). The similarities of the past, or episodes from an artifact and a literary work,
result in numerous repetitions in the characters and the plots. The whole novel would
thus seem like a replication of a certain history that has already happened. The text
itself would thus be considered as a rewriting of a fictional event or the past.
The condition of repeatedly finding similarities in artifacts or literary works
constitutes what Cook calls the “replica” or “reenactment ” of the past. As he contends,
the repetitions of similar events and personas allows the feeling that “the present is
actually only a replica or reenactment, and that genuine identity is or meaning is
always to be found elsewhere, in some experience remembered from the past, some
sort of ‘original pattern’ or prototype” (1999: 38). The true reality, or “the original
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ground ” of these events, appears to have lost forever in the circling of repetitions.
There is no finding of the beginning of all these actions or behaviors. What is left is
but the “cluster” or “networks” of repeated and interrelated incidents. Citing Booth’s
argumentation, Cook, furthermore, proposes that the characters’ acceptance of
fictional inspiration or their identification with either a painting or a notable literary
work is the attitude of “readiness,” the acceptance of being “colonized” by alien
influence. As is discussed earlier, this attitude of “readiness” is demonstrated toward
not only literary works or artifacts but also the interrelationship of the characters. That
is, their identities develop and form under the influence of the characters as well. Such
“readiness” or even acceptance renders the characters’ sensitive condition of
subalternity more persuasively.
However, the characters are not only colonized by the fictional plot and
contexts of works of art, they are in a sense colonized by each other, and placed under
the power and manipulation of surveillance and gaze. Surveillance, as is defined in
Post-Colonial Studies, “implies a viewer with an elevated vantage point” (226). It
allows the viewer the power to objectify, and form the identity of the colonized
subject(s) “in a way that fixes its identity in relation to the surveyor” (226). The
power relations of the observer and the observed trace its origin back to Foucault’s
discussion in Discipline and Punish, and what Lacan calls the mirror phase. Used in
postcolonial discourse, the act of surveillance and gaze from the colonizers define the
identity of the colonized, that is, the observed. In the case of the novel, the patient is
rendered the colonized situation. The patient’s identity is developed under the
constant surveillance of the other characters, such as Hana, Kip, and Caravaggio. The
patient, under Hana’s constant care and supervision, is identified and objectified as a
specific figure in order to fill Hana ’s lack. Also, Caravaggio’s observation, or
surveillance, of the patient results from his attempt to ferret out the suspicious identity
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of the patient. Finally, Kip, like Hana, objectifies the patient as an mentor whom he is
keen to become and imitate. Under the multiple surveillance and gazes from every
direction, the patient is powerless to form his own identity.
Kip’s worship of and the sense of devotion to the patient, furthermore, may be
approached by virtue of Homi Bhabha’s concept on the colonized subject’s mimicry
on the colonizers. As Bhabha comments in “On Mimicry and Man, ” the fluctuating
relationship between the colonized subjects and the colonizers is always ambivalent.
Bhabha comments that it is the colonizers’ intention of turning the colonized subjects
into them. But, at the same time, they are deeply threatened by the possibility that the
colonized subjects may actually become the colonizers, or are liberated by the
Western knowledge that they’ve intended to instill into the colonized subjects. Thus
the continual fluctuation of wanting one thing, and wanting its opposite, that is,
ambivalence, is adopted by Bhabha to describe such relationship (85-92). Although
the relationship between the patient and Kip is not the direct relationship of a
colonizer and a colonized subject, 26 the pattern of a brown, colonized subject
attempting to imitate and hoping to be a “reformed, recognizable Other” is observed.
Kip’s mimicry in fact is directed to not only the patient, but to Lord Suffolk as well, to
whom the relationship is more qualified as Bhabha ’s definition of the one between the
colonizer and the colonized.
Not only has he no face, or a name to be identified with, the patient has no
desire to have an identity, or to be identified with anything. He has, at the point of
meeting the wonders of the boundless desert, endeavored to erase his name and
nationality. Since the accident, he finally has had the “privilege” of throwing himself
away, and drowning himself in the fragmentary past without facing the presence. The
26
Since the patient is never a colonizing Englishman, and that the relationship between the patient and
Kip is not a colonial relationship per se, but an imagined one in Kip’s mind as he mistakes the patient
for an Englishman.
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characters are thus invited to colonize the patient, to territorialize the body, and to
endow him with the identities each wish. Nevertheless, the other characters’ eagerness
to each define him as whom they desire furthermore complicates the formation of his
identity, and renders the identification impossible to achieve. That is, the more they
try to define or shape his identity, the more liberated he is in the chaotic state of
identification. Such an attitude, however, alters the power structure of the observer
and the observed. When “the imperial gaze ” defines the identity of the subject,
“objectifying it within the identifying system of power relations, and confirms its
subalterneity and powerlessness” (Ashcraft et al 226), the power structure of the
observer and the observed is parallel to that of the colonizer and the colonized. But
contrary to the situation, the patient welcomes what appears to be the powerful
colonization and definition from other characters. He plays the role of the dying father
figure, the erudite scholar, and the mystery- like survivor of the war for Hana, Kip, and
Caravaggio respectively without resistance or reluctance. None of these identities
matters to him. Without a definite identity to be defined with, the patient performs
various roles designed by his observers, representing various identities. No longer
situated as the powerless party, he becomes the powerful one as he not only invites the
surveillance, but demonstrates how this surveillance is useless in shaping his identity.
Since the patient ’s identity remains “an enigma” (95) and in suspicion, without
truly identifying himself with any of the characters’ desire, he is thus rendered free to
practice what I call the mutability of identity representations. According to David
Roxborough and Kristina Kyser, who discuss the novel in terms of biblical
allusions, 27 the patient is both a saint and Satan, “both Jesus and the leper”
27
Kristina Kyser. “Seeing Everything in a Different Light: Vision and Revelation in Michael
Ondaatje’s The English Patient.” University of Toronto Quarterly 70.4 (2001): 889-901. David
Roxborough. “The Gospel of Almásy: Christian Mythology in Michael Ondaatje’s The English
Patient.” Essays on Canadian Writing 67 (1999): 236-54.
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(Roxorough 240), who has “hipbones of Christ” (Ondaatje 5), but falls burning from
the sky as the “Satanic figure” during “the war of heaven” (Kyser 889). The parallel
structure to the quest of the Holy Grail and of biblical stories, as Roxborough and
Kyser each discusses in their essays, function to influence the development of the
characters’ identities and behaviors as well. Kyser’s observation that “the characters
take on the qualities of biblical figures” (889) resonates Cook’s argument that the
characters tend to follow the exact route of the characters in previous literary woks or
figures in history. However, identified as the “despairing saint” (Ondaatje 3), Satan, or
as Adam (Ondaatje 144), the patient undergoes these various “shifts in identification”
that he himself appears to have lost among these different identities. As he rambles on
during the interrogation of the British army, “driving them mad, traitor or ally, leaving
them never quite sure who he was” (Ondaatje 96), the patient apparently does not
follow any “route” that Cook refers to. Different from other characters, he is not
colonized or influenced by the figures in historical incident or characters in previous
art works. His identity is, in the attempt to analyzed, deconstructed, and constructed,
“stripped away to such as extent that what remains is ‘unrecognizable ’” (Kyser 894).
Unlike what Cook comments in “Being and Representation, ”28 Roxborough
argues that although adopting various allusions of the mythical images and figures,
Ondaatje creates the atmosphere that the holy figures are not that holy after all.
Roxborough writes that the “[r]eligious images are depicted ambiguously or
juxtaposed with negative images that cannot but sully the faith’s pretensions of
purity” (240). This echoes the statement that the whole idea of setting up in parallel
structure between the novel and the other literary classics is to deconstruct the
hegemonic and dominant position of the latter. Roxborough furthermore contends that
28
Cook claims that the characters tend to follow the exact route of the characters in previous literary
woks or figures in history. PAGINATION?
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the shifting and changing of identities presents the uncertainty of the characters’
identifications, highlighting the representation and performance of identity:
Apart from its obvious practical function, the constant shift and change of
mythical identity— in which a single character [the English patient] may
become both saint and Satan in the space of a few pages— presents
uncertainty that is symptomatic of internal struggle. (Roxborough 239)
Ondaatje’s design of not only applying but also subverting mythical identities
functions to question the long-standing status of Western classics.
Discussing the topic of salvation, Roxborough and Kyser comment that in
addition to the mutability of mystical identity, the biblical allusions in Ondaatje’s
novel are evident and ubiquitous. The allusion of baptism, for instance, is
demonstrated by the Bedouin herbal healer who “would enter a camp and set up the
curtain of bottles in front of whoever was sick” (Ondaatje 10). As the patient
describes, “he seemed a vessel to himself, this merchant doctor, this king of oils and
perfumes and panaceas, this baptist” (Ondaatje 10, emphasis mine). It appears that
each character is baptized by something. Caravaggio is baptized by the sense of love.
Hana once comments that Caravaggio is a man who is not “just in love but always
sinking within it. Always confused. Always happy” (129). In addition, Hana
resembles Katharine’s passion for moisture, meditates to herself that “most of all she
wished for a river she could swim in” (129). She also performs baptism for Kip as she
pours milk onto Kip’s body, “over his brown hand and up his arm to his elbow and
then stopped. He did n’t move away” (123). The action may also be interpreted as
Kip’s willingness of being baptized as a white, against his religious belief and his
ethnicity. As the action of salvation and repentance, the patient wishes to be showered
with rain on his charred body as he lies dying in the villa.
The biblical allusion is also demonstrated by means of the figures in the novel.
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Roxborough suggests that “the interaction of these identities and the collection of
scattered images they contribute allows for the subtextual development of a narrative
that culminates in an essential of the New Testament ” (236). Apart from the patient ’s
shifting identities as a saint, the Satan, and an Adam, the three- member-group that Kip
works with during his training in England also demonstrate the resemblance of
biblical figures. They are Lord Suffolk, the bomb dismantling officer, Miss Morton,
his secretary, and Mr. Fred Harts, the chauffeur, whom constantly work together, are
thus “called the Holy Trinity” (Ondaatje 178). The twelve sappers who remain behind
in Naples before the suspicious bomb blow up at three in the midnight mirrors the
figures of Christ’s twelve disciples. The allusion of biblical imageries, on the other
hand, is also prevalent in the novel. Blood, for instance, “is literally consumed in the
novel” (Roxborough 241). The constant deaths in the wartime hospital scare the
nurses. The scene is depicted as extremely bloody. As Hana remembers,
They [the nurses] would carry a severed arm down the hall, or swab at
blood that never stopped, as if the wound were a well, and they began to
believe in nothing, trust nothing. (Ondaatje 40)
The blood imageries are also observed in the relationship between Almásy and
Katherine. For instance, Almásy states that “she [Katharine] once suck blood from a
cut on my hand as I have tasted and swallowed her menstrual blood” (170). Almásy’s
list of wounds (153), too, demonstrates the various scenes of blood and injuries as
Almásy appears in the public, wearing “bruises or a bandaged head and explain about
how the taxi jerking to a halt so that he had hit the open side window” (154), or
showing the mark of “iodine on his forearm that covered a welt” (154).
The biblical allusion to apocalypse, in addition, is replicated twice in the novel.
One is the night before the electricity turns on in the deserted city of Naples, and the
other, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the story. As Kip
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and the other eleven sappers dive into the city in order to search for the suspected
mimes, Kip, finding shelter in a chapel of Rosary, realizes that although he may die
after only a few hours, “walls will crumble around him or he will walk through a city
of light” (Ondaatje 280). Naples, “the city of twelve” is transformed into “the city of
light.” Also, while Kip hears the astonishing news of the nuclear bombings in Japan,
he imagines that “If he closes his eyes, he sees the streets of Asia full of fire. It rolls
across cities like a burst map, the hurricane of heat withering bodies as it meets them,
the shadow of humans suddenly in the air” (284). The racial and secular apocalypse
divides the good from the evil, the Allies from the Axis. It exemplifies what Kip calls
the “tremor of Western wisdom” (284). And Caravaggio knows that Kip is right, for
neither the Allies nor the Axis “would never have dropped such a bomb on a white
nation” (286). As Caravaggio contemplates, “A terrible event emerging out of the
shortwave. A new war. The death of a civilization” (286). Roxborough at the end of
his essay concludes that “The English Patient may be read as a collage of
mythological images, glimpsed briefly but often throughout the novel. The allusions
to the Old Testament, Paradise Lost, and Christian symbols [...] occur in quick
sequence, as if in a motion picture” (240). The English Patient’s richness of Christian
myths and biblical imageries not only allows the dialogue between the previous
literary texts and the novel itself to take place, but also affirms Ondaatje’s intention of
demonstrating the shifting identifications and the inter-relationship among the
characters.
Sadashige comments that “[t]he novel’s primary characters are all situated
within transgressive erotic entanglements” (245). The love affair between Kip and the
Canadian nurse Hana is interracial and transnational. The idea of transgression is
without doubt deeply rooted in Almásy’s mind as he commits adultery with the wife
of a friend, and betrays his friends’ alignment for Katharine, crossing social and
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national boundaries. He believes that people “are not owned or monogamous in our
tastes or experience. All I desire was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps”
(261). It is his desire for Katharine that animates his betrayals. Indeed the theme of
betrayal is observed in many characters in the novel. The patient betrays his friend so
as to develop the underground relationship with Katharine. He also betrays the Allies,
leading the German armies into the desert. Katharine, too, betrays her beloved
husband for Almásy. Hana, regardless of her commitment to the duty of a wartime
nurse, decides that her war or “the war here” is over, betraying her calling to continue
the duty. Caravaggio, on the other hand, betraying his nature as an unrestrained thief
and a womanizer, becomes a tool that is of British Empire, stealing for the
government ’s sake. And finally Kip, the colonized subject, betrays his native country
and joins the army of the colonizers, only to wake up at the news of the bombing of
Japan. Indeed the theme of betrayal is evident in the characterization of many of the
characters. The shifting alliances of each main character in their own battles resonate
their shifting identities and highlight the condition of mutability.
The characteristic of mutability of the personas’ identification is thus observed
by means of the inter-relationships among the developments of the characters’
identities. Unlike the patient, who is not colonized by the gaze of the surrounding
characters, the other three main characters demonstrate their subaltern characteristics
by revealing their mutual influence of each other as well as their complete acceptance
of literary works, artifacts, or historical figures.
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Conclusion
Like Sadashige, who claims to have been “seduced by The English Patient ” in
her article (247), I too, was enchanted by the cinematic version, and later fell in love
with Ondaatje’s characters as I read the novel. The novel, combining multi- layers
effects and a great variety of topics, weaves a magical world that not only enthralls its
readers but also discusses many of the serious topics in academic and critical circles.
In the thesis I have attempted to treat The English Patient as a postcolonial novel. But
the question as to why it is a postcolonial text may still arise in readers’ minds. Like
many literary works that can be classified under the terrain of postcolonial discourse,
the novel attempts to map the condition and the resistance of the subaltern and the
colonized subjects, However, unlike novels that set the temporal and spatial
background in the exact time and space of colonized countries, Ondaatje attempts
something new by presenting his characters as the “new subaltern, ”29 who are
rendered victims under the war regardless of their skin colors. Placing his characters
in the wartime Europe, rather than in the marginal spaces such as the colonized
countries, Ondaatje furthermore portrays the traumatized condition of the European
Continent as under the same violent attacks as the third-world continents. Readers are
thus introduced to a group of characters whose identities are seemingly not so much
as the subaltern but suffer from the traumatic experience in the traumatized land.
One of the reasons why the novel may be treated as a postcolonial text is its
obvious rewriting of the colonial novel, Kim. As is observed by Ashcraft, Griffiths,
and Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back, the main purpose of post-colonial writing is to
“interrogate European discourse and discursive strategies from its position within and
29
By “new subaltern” I mean the extension of the definition by the Subaltern Studies Group’s, but all
who are under the force of hegemony— such as the four main characters in the novel— erasing the
distinctions of ethnicity.
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between two worlds, to investigate the means by which Europe imposed and
maintained its codes in its colonial domination of so much of the rest of the world”
(196). The responses and the reflections that are given to colonial novels are thus
crucial in the terrain of postcolonial discourse. As Ashcraft, Griffiths, and Tiffin
continue to argue,
these subversive maneuvers, rather than the construction of essentially
national or regional alternatives, are the characteristic features of the
post-colonial text. Post-colonial literatures/cultures are constituted in
counter-discursive rather than homologous. (196)
The relationship between Kim and The English Patient, as discussed in Chapter One,
is the relationship between the colonial and the postcolonial novel. Ondaatje’s
rewriting of Kipling’s Kim is exemplified by means of the similarities of names (Kip
and Kim), subversive plot (the inverted position of the characters in both novels), and
the reversed position of subject and object. That is, while the Indians in Kim are
depicted as under the total control and dominance of the British government, the
Bedouins in The English Patient are portrayed as a mysterious tribe, unknown even to
the knowledgeable English patient. British colo nizers’ authority of narrating the
histories of the subaltern/colonized subjects is deprived of in Kim while returned by
Ondaatje in The English Patient.
The intertextuality of the novel also fits the profiles of a postcolonial novel as it
is the frequent technique to inter-texualize other literary works in a postcolonial
literary work. Ondaatje borrows various literary works and artifacts as the targets of
his revision in the text, including Kipling’s Kim, the Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost,
Herotodus’s The Histories, Caravaggio’s biography, and his painting David with the
Head of Goliath. These significant literary works and artifacts enable Ondaatje to
(re-)narrate an alternative history that is different from that of the Western hegemony,
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and to demonstrate the characteristic of the representation of the subaltern characters.
The subversion of the literary works and historical figures also allows Ondaatje to
interrogate the authoritative history. Similar to what Herodotus has done in The
Histories, Ondaatje maps a half real and half fictional world by adopting existing
historical figures, such as Count Ladislaus de Almásy, Geoffrey and Katharine Clifton,
and other members of the Royal Geographical Society, with fictional plot, that is, the
secret love affair between Almásy and Katharine. The remembrance and histories, in
addition, are recorded by the space, both geographical and bodily. Water, for instance,
is depicted as the continual absence in the desert yet always remembered and
celebrated. In short, the space is like a pamphlet that records and documents layers of
histories without wiping them out. Histories are never obliviated.
Another reason why The English Patient is classified as a postcolonial text lies
on Ondaatje’s demonstration of a broken and wounded space. To present a victimized
space is crucial and inevitable in the postcolonial terrain. In discussing such
characteristic, I have drawn examples of how Ondaatje adopts a wartime Europe as
the background of the story, and the four mentally and physically traumatized
characters as heroines of the novel. The term “deterritorialization” is also mentioned
in the discussion. Borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari, the term is used to describe
the manipulation of the colonizers toward the colonized, deterritorialization may well
be employed in discussing the villa and the bodies of the characters. The author blurs
the distinction between space and place by merging the desert and the villa in the
patient’s remembrance, the villa and its natural surroundings. He also breaks the
limitation of the characters’ bodies, opening wounds that allow alien influences into
the bodies, such as the injections that Caravaggio gives to himself and to the patient in
order for him to tell the truth about his identity and Caravaggio’s castration of thumbs
that results in his lose of nerve. The boundaries of the limitations, whether the body or
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geography, are broken, or deterritorialized, in order to undergo the process of healing
and reterritorialization. By the end of the novel, each character has founded a way out
of their misery, and managed to storm out of the trauma of war and begin a new life
outside the villa.
Although encompassing many topics, the novel is distinguished and is
recognized as an excellent reading that enthralls the readers’ minds by means of its
characterization and the characters. The relationship of the four main characters is
deeply rooted, and under the influence of greater forces, such as literary works and
historical figures in the past. It is such mingling relationship that develops and
influences the identities of the four main characters. For instance, the triangle
relationship of Geoffrey, Katharine, and Almásy is presented as the alternative
version of the cautionary tale of Candaules, Candaules’s queen, and Gyges in The
Histories. The successive connection between Kip and the patient resembles that
between David and Goliath in Caravaggio ’s painting. Moreover, Kip’s tendency in
seeking strangers’ intimacy is fulfilled by contemplating the murals of Queen Sheba
that he once saw in the church, while his fear for death is comforted by imagining the
conversation of the three angelic statues in the chapel of Rosary at the night he stays
in the city of Naples. Moreover, Hana finds certain similarities of her interactions
with the patient and Kip in the characters of Kipling’s Kim. Ondaatje’s clear
indication of suggesting the readers to make comparisons of these literary and art
works with the novel furthermore demonstrates the characteristic of intertextuality in
not only the plot of the novel but also the personalities of the characters.
Among the characters, the patient demonstrates the charisma because of his
Byronic character and his mutability in identity representations. The patient, liberated
from a fixed identity, is rendered nameless and nationless. However, enjoying the
condition, the patient becomes the cure for the other characters as they attempt to
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fulfill their lacks in identifying him. The patient ’s mutability of identity representation
mirrors what Hall has discussed in “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” that the cultural
identity is always undergoing transformations, always “unstable, metamorphic, and
sometimes even contradictory” (233), and is formed “within representation” (245).
The nationality of the patient, for instance, has always been a mistake throughout the
novel. As he appears mindless about identifying himself, the other three main
characters come to identify for him, or in fact, for them. By means of projecting their
desirable images or identities onto the nameless and nationless patient, their lacks are
fulfilled and their traumas self-cured while the patient is still rendered identity- less at
the end. Furthermore, presenting the four marginalized characters under the pillages
of colonial power struggles and imperial expansions as the heroines of the novel,
Ondaatje subverts Spivak’s contention that the subaltern cannot speak. As the novel
has demonstrates that these subaltern and marginalized characters do speak for
themselves and are able to narrate their own histories and remembrance.
Subverting Western histories in a single text, Ondaatje re-writes Western
canons, narrating a wounded space and damaged bodies that remember the past, and
demonstrating the vulnerability of the subaltern characters who struggle to survive
under the Western power/political struggle. In my attempt to analyze the novel in
terms of postcolonial orientation, I come to the conclusion that Ondaatje,
maneuvering the topics of history, space, and identity, has indeed written a novel that
can be categorized as minor literature, a term defined by Deleuze and Guattari, as well
as a postcolonial text. Although the terrain and the definition of postcolonial discourse
and literature have always been discursive and difficult to define, as McClintock has
mentioned in her argumentative essay, postcolonial discourse functions as a useful
and convincing method in the analysis of a certain category of the literature that
narrates colonial condition. Examining the characteristics that are discussed, I include
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The English Patient as one among the category of postcolonial literature, and a
subversive one.
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