Reclaiming the Past: Michael Ondaatje and the Body of History

Author(s): Christopher McVey

Source: Journal of Modern Literature , Vol. 37, No. 2 (Winter 2014), pp. 141-160
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.37.2.141

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Reclaiming the Past: Michael Ondaatje
and the Body of History

Christopher McVey
University of Wisconsin-Madison

This essay examines the connection between body, history, and nation in Michael
Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1993). The novel dramatizes and responds to questions
concerning national belonging and community, while at the same time it longs to escape
or transcend nation and history. The dialectical push and pull of this desire to escape and
return is animated through the way that The English Patient imagines the body as a
contested and contesting space, a conduit into the past and the means through which that
past might be reclaimed. As a consequence, I hope to nuance political assessments of the
novel and of Ondaatje’s contribution to historiographical metafiction more broadly, as
well as his dual status as both a postmodern and postcolonial writer.

Keywords: Michael Ondaatje / historiographical metafiction / historiography /

transnational / postcolonial literature

I
n Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1993), the patient — whose body
is burned beyond recognition, denationalized and deracialized, who cannot
remember his own past and who keeps a heavily amended version of Herodo-
tus’ Histories at his side — talks to Hana of the desert explorers at the beginning
of the twentieth century: “We were German, English, Hungarian, African. . . .
Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations. We are deformed by
nation-states” (138–9). The patient’s remark echoes a comment Michael Ondaatje
made in a 2011 interview with The Observer: “I am a mongrel of place. Of race.
Of cultures. Of many genres” (qtd. in McCrum n.p.) Both observations mobilize
bodily metaphors of monstrosity to describe an unstable relationship between
the sovereign self and the larger communities of citizenship in which that self is
enmeshed. In the first instance, the nation-state causes a wounding or “deforma-
tion” of an otherwise whole and independent subject. In the second instance, the
mongrel figures as a tentative, interstitial space between — a hybrid body that
belongs everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
Many read in Ondaatje’s writing a longing to fly beyond the nets of national-
ity, language, and religion in order to reach, like James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus,
some level of autonomy from the national and historical worlds of which one is

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142 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 2

a part. Yet I argue that Ondaatje’s work frequently incorporates a countervailing

desire to return, to reclaim, and to bear witness to the historical and national
worlds from which his characters emerge. More specifically, this ambivalence
registers itself through bodily wounding and trauma. These bodies — mongrel,
interstitial, and frequently wounded — encode what I term a “double gesture.”
They function as troubled sites between the past and the present, bearing that past
forward but inevitably occluding or frustrating the present’s ability to decipher
that past. The characters thus become caught in a double-bind between a political
and ethical injunction to bear witness to the past and a longing to sever one’s con-
nection with that past. In examining this relationship between bodily wounding,
trauma, and historiography, I argue that Ondaatje’s modernist and postmodern
aesthetic practices mark not a divestment from, but a commitment to, the complex
politics of postcolonial subjects and postcolonial theory more broadly.
As Linda Hutcheon points out, Ondaatje shares with writers like Graham
Swift, Salman Rushdie, and Umberto Eco an interest in “problematiz[ing] the
entire notion of historical knowledge,” and as such his texts are concerned not only
with what historical narratives represent, but also with what any claim or repre-
sentation also occludes (Hutcheon 89). Lee Spinks has similarly described this
particular tendency for Ondaatje’s writing to highlight “the inevitable inscription
of subjective and ideological points-of-view within the medium of historical nar-
rative” (51). This is nowhere more evident, perhaps, than in one of Ondaatje’s early
poems, “The Cinnamon Peeler” (1982). In it, the cinnamon peeler’s work — and,
by proxy, his family, his location, and his historical moment — make it impossible
for him to do anything more than desire his lover from a distance:
Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon . . . (Ondaatje, Running in the Family 95)

To be a cinnamon peeler is to have one’s body tied to a specific space and

place, including the economic and colonial dimensions of one’s work. The body
occupies a liminal space between past and present and between the personal
and the public; it marks the speaker in terms of her or his work as a colonial
laborer, and likewise encodes the past relationship with the cinnamon peeler’s
lover. The “profession” of fingers both touch and do not touch the lover’s body,
implying that the physical connection between the lovers is always a tentative
or unstable one, a dangerous contamination at the same time it implies a shared,
erotic moment. The body thus becomes the contested site of history, retaining
a connection between the lovers, but implying that this connection is fleeting,
momentary, and elusive. The addressee is imagined as one trying to erase her
connection with that past.

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Michael Ondaatje and the Body of History 143

Likewise, just as the English patient momentarily finds an escape from his
past and history in his burned body, riddled also with short-term amnesia, so the
cinnamon peeler longs to escape from the world:
When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free
you could hold me and be blind of smell. (Ondaatje, Running 96)

The earlier motifs — blindness and water — now take on opposite roles. Blindness
affords the speaker’s body and identity an autonomy not defined through work,
family, caste, or class, as it had before.1 Water no longer serves a medium of era-
sure, but rather makes possible a liminal space for the lovers to come together.
The stanza balances on a tentative and ironized logic: freedom is only possible
through confinement in the water, and the lovers’ bodies can only come into full
contact with each other if that contact is limited, even willfully “blind of smell.”
The synesthesia compounds the stanza’s contradictory impulses: erotic pleasure
depends on a sensual deafness or disability. But just as the cinnamon peeler’s body
is encoded with specific ties to his work, his caste and class, the cinnamon peeler’s
lover refuses the liminal seclusion that the water offers:
You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women

the grass cutter’s wife, the lime burner’s daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume

and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner’s daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler’s wife. Smell me. (Running 96–7)

The poem’s final gesture — a return to the world, a reclaiming of the past and
of one’s connection to it — concludes with a significant moment of communal
and performative witnessing. The two similes that end the penultimate stanza of
the poem equate scars with a language, wounds with words. The responsibility of

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144 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 2

the writer is thus analogous to the responsibility of the cinnamon peeler’s lover:
to read the scars of history, to claim them as one’s own, though perhaps not to
speak for them, nor to conclude authoritatively how they might be interpreted.
The wound represents, in this way, a kind of historical trauma. The body speaks
through its scars, but these scars are always troubled witnesses. They represent
the past, but they are always trying to heal over, to seal themselves off, to erase
the very histories that created them.
As Cathy Caruth has explained in her retelling of Torquato Tasso’s La
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), traumatic experience “is not locatable in the sim-
ple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that
its very unassimilated nature — the way it was precisely not known in the first
instance — returns to haunt the survivor later on” (Caruth 4). Testimonial narra-
tive thus operates in a way that “simultaneously defies and demands our witness,”
embodied as a traumatic wound that “cr[ies] out,” but which can never be fully
assimilated into or articulated in language. As conceived in trauma studies, this
failure to describe or recapture the past paradoxically bears witness to the trauma
of that past through — and not in spite of — its failure to articulate.
It is not surprising, then, that Ondaatje rhymes the dialectic between self
and nation with wounding and trauma. Both involve a concomitant gesture
back to the past and forward into the future, figuring this relation as partially
resolved — wounds scar over — and partially unresolved, since scars seldom disap-
pear entirely. The wounded or scarred bodies in Ondaatje’s fiction are thus forms
or sites of writing at the same time they signify an erasure, a figural scarring-
over of history, both personal and communal. Likewise, in his prose and poetry,
Ondaatje is interested in a variety of recoveries: the recovery of a public past, even
if that past is contingent and malleable; the recovery of personal identity and ori-
gin, even if that origin is hybrid, mongrel, and only accessible through politically
suspect discourses; and the recovery of ethically viable modes of representation,
even if those modes provide merely provisional or partial knowledge.
The critical lenses offered by trauma theory also help us to complicate what
some critics have identified as a possibly problematic aestheticization of violence
in Ondaatje’s work, especially in The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost (2000).
Although it is beyond the scope of this essay to consider modernist or late mod-
ernist form and its broader relationship with trauma — especially since so much
of modernist aesthetic practices were fashioned during or between the two World
Wars — it is unsurprising that modernist fragmentation, collage, and tempo-
ral instability feature so prominently in Ondaatje’s writing. For even as these
deformed or wounded bodies both register and occlude the trauma of history,
either personal or public, the aesthetic pyrotechnics of Ondaatje’s texts — their
elliptical temporalities and fragmented structures — might be read as surrogate
deformed, wounded, or mongrel bodies, their tissues woven together into forms
that bear witness to the traumatic pasts that have shaped them. Thus, Ondaatje’s
unique blend of modernist fragmentation and postmodern narrative mutability
operates as a mode of traumatic testimony. It attempts to “articulate” the past,

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Michael Ondaatje and the Body of History 145

to bring together the body of history, while also highlighting its own failures in
this regard, its elisions the result of its inability to articulate the past in a clear
narrative chronology.
For example, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), a collage prose-poem
that defies genre distinctions, blending memoir, poetry, photography, journal-
ism, dime-novels, and biography, reconstructs Billy’s final year as an outlaw in
New Mexico. The collage of material that makes up the text reveals more about
the ways Billy the Kid has been claimed, rewritten, and romanticized by the
Americas’ fascination and commodification of the “Wild West” than it does about
Billy himself. At the book’s close, Ondaatje considers what we might find if we
exhumed Billy’s grave:
Imagine if you dug him up and brought him out. You’d see very little. There’d be the
buck teeth. Perhaps Garrett’s bullet no longer in thick wet flesh would roll in the
skull like a marble. From the head there’d be a trail of vertebrae like a row of pearl
buttons off a rich coat down to the pelvis. The arms would be cramped on the edge
of what was the box. And a pair of hand-cuffs, holding ridiculously the fine ankle
bones. (Even though dead they buried him in leg-irons). There would be the silver
from the toe of each boot.

His legend a jungle sleep (Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid 101)

The coffin, the leg-irons, the ridiculous hand-cuffs: all are metaphors for the
work of historical narrative, its explanatory procedures, its attempt to “arrest”
time — here imagined as Billy’s fully decomposed and thus absent body — in ways
both linguistic and intelligible. The gathered remains, or what is left of them, con-
stitute the final “collected works” of Billy the Kid, though they cannot speak for
themselves, do not constitute a narrative unless imagined into the “thick wet flesh”
of Billy’s decomposed body. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid — a body of text
assembled from various other “historical sources” about Billy — is more about the
various ways these texts attempt to tell Billy’s story than it is about the story itself.
It is, in this sense, a matter of historiography rather than history, a text about its
own mediation: its seams are meant to show. For example, the first page contains
an empty portrait box, which presumably should hold Billy’s picture. This image
is denied to the reader for the rest of the text until the final page, where we find
not a picture of Billy, but of a small child — perhaps Ondaatje himself — dressed
in a cowboy outfit. For Ondaatje, there is an ethical obligation involved in resur-
recting, in collecting, in giving form and structure to the past while there is, at
the same time, a sense of inevitable failure.
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is in this regard an important, though not
always acknowledged, predecessor for The English Patient. The novel centers on a
group of characters who, both by circumstance and choice, have found themselves
living together in the partially bombed and ruined Villa San Girolamo in Italy at
the end of World War II. Unlike Billy the Kid, however, the bodies of this novel
are all survivors of the past and continue to live on in the present. Like Billy the

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146 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 2

Kid, though, they come to find that their ability to operate as witnesses to that
past is troubled at best.
Hana, a twenty-year old Canadian nurse working for the Allies, has decided
to remain in the villa to care for “the English patient,” an unidentified man found
by the desert Bedouin after surviving a plane crash somewhere in the Libyan Des-
ert. She is soon joined by David Caravaggio, a spy recovering from his detention
by the Germans, and Kirpal Singh, an Allied Sikh sapper tasked with defusing
bombs and mines buried around the area. Although in some sense centered on
the mystery of the English patient’s true identity — further recalling the primary
objective of Billy the Kid — the novel is really about the past behind all of the
characters, who must come to terms with some form of traumatic experience.
Hana has lost her father in the war and, although she is hesitant to admit it, has
performed a self-abortion on a child whose unnamed father has also died while
fighting. David Caravaggio, who knew Hana and her family in Canada before
the war, is addicted to morphine and, along with his deformed hands, is obsessed
with discovering whether or not the English patient was a German spy, and thus
responsible for the death of countless other Allied troops. Kip’s English mentor
and closest friend, Lord Suffolk, has been blown up while attempting to defuse a
bomb, whose “joke” or new fuse design Kip himself decodes soon after.
The English patient has his own past that he must inevitably come to terms
with, which he is able to accomplish — to a certain degree — through his time
with Hana, Caravaggio, and Kip. This forms the second main plot of the text,
which takes place through a series of flashbacks to the 1930s. After Caravaggio
administers a truth serum, the patient reveals himself to be Count László de
Almásy, a Hungarian desert explorer who had an affair with Katharine Clifton,
the wife of the affluent Geoffrey Clifton. The Cliftons had joined Almásy’s desert
exploration team in the early 1930s, as Geoffrey was secretly an English spy sent
to collect intelligence on Almásy’s group. Geoffrey had other intelligence about
the affair, and he attempts to kill both his wife and Almásy in a murder-suicide,
crashing his plane in the desert. Both Almásy and Katharine survive, though
Katharine is severely injured. Almásy, forced to leave her in a desert cave, is at
first unable to return to save her, though he eventually aids the Nazis in order to
travel back to the desert and collect her body.
One of the main symbolic objects of the text is the English patient’s heavily
amended 1890 edition of Herodotus’ Histories, into which he pastes cigarette
papers over certain passages so that he may include his own personal newspaper
clippings, letters, sketches, and notes. This book is the only remnant of his past
that he has brought to the villa, and it is this book that he originally leaves with
Katharine in the Cave of Swimmers. Almásy explains his interest in Herodotus
as follows:
I have seen editions of The Histories with a sculpted portrait on the cover. Some statue
found in a French museum. But I never imagine Herodotus this way. I see him more
as one of those spare men of the desert who travel from oasis to oasis, trading legends

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Michael Ondaatje and the Body of History 147

as if it is the exchange of seeds, consuming everything without suspicion, piecing

together a mirage. “This history of mine,” Herodotus says, “has from the beginning
sought out the supplementary to the main argument.” What you find in him are
cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history — how people betray each other for the sake
of nations, how people fall in love. . . . (119)

We are clearly meant to read the English patient himself as a “spare [man] of the
desert,” who gradually reveals a history of his own throughout the novel. But if
the story we are being told is, according to the logic of this metaphor, a heavily
amended collage, then what does this reveal about The English Patient as a novel
and the English patient as a character, both “mirage[s] . . . pieced together” from
the annals of history? Likewise, why must Almásy return to collect Katharine’s
body if there is no chance of saving her? It is curious that critics have not high-
lighted that, in returning to Katharine and the Cave of Swimmers, Almásy does
exactly what he insisted he would not do: identify national allegiance in order to
claim responsibility for Katharine’s body and their shared past together.
The English Patient has been read primarily — and this is especially apparent
in the Anthony Minghella’s 1996 award-winning film adaptation — as a star-
crossed love story, the impossible affair between Almásy and Katharine, along
with Geoffrey’s jealousy, mirroring the present affair between Hana and Kip,
completed by Caravaggio’s jealousy. The novel, which won the Governor Gen-
eral’s Award and the Booker Prize, caused a controversy when it was revealed that
Ondaatje had based the patient’s character on a real historical figure by the same
name, a desert explorer and Nazi sympathizer. It is in this sense a story of betrayal:
of Katharine and Almásy’s betrayal of Geoffrey, of Katharine’s betrayal of Almásy,
and of Almásy’s betrayal of the English. Both love and betrayal figure promi-
nently when Katharine reads the story of Candaules and Gyges from Herodotus,
which Almásy pinpoints as the moment he first fell in love with Katharine:
“This is a story of how I fell in love with a woman, who read me a specific story
from Herodotus. I heard the words she spoke across the fire, never looking up,
even when she teased her husband. . . . Words, Caravaggio. They have a power”
(233–34). But The English Patient is above all about various kinds of claiming: a
claim for anonymity counterweighted with responsibility for claiming ownership
of one’s own traumatic past, claims for sovereign autonomy both compromised
and made possible through the claims of love or intimacy, and conflicting claims
to historical truth.
The problem, then, hinges on how the characters negotiate claiming and
disclaiming the past, both personal and public. During the affair Almásy and
Katharine talk about what they each most despise. Katharine answers, “A lie. And
you?” Almásy responds, “Ownership . . . when you leave me, forget me” (152).
Almásy’s refusal to abide by the rules of possession or ownership makes him a foil
to Geoffrey, who when he first lands in the desert to join the expedition jokingly
declares, “I name this site the Bir Messaha Country Club” (142). In contrast to
the clear colonial and political dimensions inherent in cartographical charting and

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148 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 2

Western exploration, particularly of Africa, Almásy is interested in quite another

kind of project, another reason for being in the desert:
The desert could not be claimed or owned — it was a piece of cloth carried by winds,
never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Can-
terbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East. Its
caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an
ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance,
wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith . . . Ain,
Bir, Wadi, Foggara, Khottara, Shaduf. I didn’t want my name against such beauti-
ful names. Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the
desert. (139)

This is in some sense analogous to the cinnamon peeler’s desire to retreat to the
liminal seclusion of the water. The desert is a “place of faith,” oddly because the
patient imagines it in purely secular terms. This is a clear contrast to organized
religion’s own political cooptation, which causes Madox to shoot himself in the
middle of a Mass while the priest delivers a homily in an attempt to justify the
war. But it is Katharine who insists that such a desire — to erase names, to erase
nations — is unfeasible, or even irresponsible: “You slide past everything with
your fear of hate and ownership, of owning, of being owned, of being named. You
think this is a virtue. I think you are inhuman” (238). Almásy does not respond
to her, but this passage does in part explain why he must return to the Cave of
Swimmers to collect Katharine’s body, wrapped in the plane’s parachute, even
though it has been three months since he had left her to seek help. To return to
collect Katharine is to “claim” her, to acknowledge his responsibility for her death,
even though when Caravaggio asks him about whether or not he holds himself
responsible, he likewise does not answer. The Cave of Swimmers — named for
the ancient, aboriginal paintings discovered there — is thus an ironic oasis, both
an echo of Almásy’s love for the desert (he continuously describes the desert as a
kind of ocean and the Bedouin as seafarers) and its opposite, a womb of unclaimed
historical time and a space which makes possible the partial reclaiming of that
unclaimed past.
However, it is important to remember that Almásy’s attempt to reclaim
Katharine is, ultimately, an unsuccessful one. Carrie Dawson and Sam Solecki
have appropriately connected The English Patient’s interest in historiography as it
intersects with trauma, further drawing on Cathy Caruth’s description of trau-
matic experiences as those which cannot be assimilated, and so are continuously
relived as a “double telling . . . between the story of the unbearable nature of an
event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival” (Caruth 187). This
doubleness figures in a variety of ways, particularly in terms of the body. When
Almásy attempts to reclaim Katharine’s body, he digs Madox’s old plane out of
the desert and refuels it with petrol — a plane that they had previously abandoned
to the sand, a performative gesture echoing Almásy’s own desire to lose himself
in the desert, to erase his name. When he collects her body and takes off, Almásy

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Michael Ondaatje and the Body of History 149

imagines the recovered plane as “rotted . . . carrion” with “the canvas sheetings on
the wings ripping open in the speed. . . . The woman translated into leaves and
twigs, the broken glass to the sky like a jaw above him” (175). The plane — now
also symbolic of both Katharine’s decomposed body and an echo of Clifton’s
murder-suicide attempt from his own plane, itself the result of Almásy’s secret
affair — catches on fire: “He slips into the harness of the oil-wet parachute and
pivots upside down, breaking free of glass, wind flinging his body back. Then his
legs are free of everything, and he is in the air, bright, not knowing why he is
bright until he realizes he is on fire” (175). The inability to reclaim Katharine is
thus paired with the inability to reclaim or assimilate fully his responsibility for
her death. She is a body, but a body “translated” into the patient’s story about her
and also into the blackened image of Almásy’s own burned body, itself a kind of
“rotted . . . carrion.”
These are not neutral translations, nor simply textual rhymes linking the
characters together, but a commentary on art and narrative’s ability to bear wit-
ness to the past while also highlighting its own aporia, its failure at mimesis.
As Theodor Adorno has explained, the power of such art lies precisely in this
horizon between representation and difference. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno notes
that “the true language of art is mute,” (Adorno 112) recalling Caruth’s read-
ing of double wounding in Tasso’s story: “trauma seems to be much more than
a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche: it is always the story of
a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or
truth that is not otherwise available. This truth, in its delayed appearance and
its belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what
remains unknown in our very actions and our language” (Caruth 4). Such art is
always a partially traumatic event, attaining its aesthetic value precisely through
its “difference from empirical reality” (Adorno 7). This is why, for Adorno, aes-
thetic theory must be a matter of negative dialectics, aesthetic mimesis not as
reflection, but refraction.
The patient’s body thus becomes the vehicle through which the various
characters, including the English patient himself, re-imagine or reclaim their
own past, though they find that they are never able to reclaim that past entirely.
Hana’s need to care for the patient — which she jokingly refers to as an obvious
consequence of her “father complex” (84) — becomes the means by which she can
repress her own survivor’s guilt. She believes that caring for the patient absolves
or in some way allows her to do what she could not do for all of her other patients
in the war, including her lost father: “He was a burned man and I was a nurse and I
could have nursed him. Do you understand the sadness of geography? I could have saved
him . . .” (296, emphasis original). She charges these lost bodies with a kind of
linguistic power. Though the bodies are unburied and thus unassimilated, lan-
guage itself is imagined through a surrogate burial: “Throughout the war, with
all of her worst patients, she survived by keeping a coldness hidden in her role as
nurse. I will survive this. I won’t fall apart at this. These were buried sentences
all through her war” (48). These “buried sentences” resurface in the patient’s own

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150 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 2

body. She describes him as a “man with no face. An ebony pool. All identification
consumed in a fire . . . [t]here was nothing to recognize in him” (48).
There is also “nothing to recognize” in Hana herself — for more than a year,
we are told that she has refused to look at herself in a mirror, until she accidently
does so while caring for the patient at the villa: “She peered into her look, trying
to recognize herself ” (52). The patient is both an Other and a mirror, reflecting
back to Hana her own traumatic past that she could not previously confront or
assimilate, but reflecting that past imperfectly, allowing Hannah to explore her
relationship with that past while keeping it safely at arm’s length.
Likewise, it is no accident that Caravaggio is caught by the Nazis after he
breaks into a house in an attempt to “reclaim” pictures of himself, having acci-
dently let himself be photographed while working undercover at a German party.
He spends the war inventing “double agents or phantoms who would take on
flesh . . . like a man in the darkness of a room imitating the calls of a bird . . . [but
here there] was no defense but to look for the truth in others” (117). The patient’s
body operates as the site through which these truths manifest themselves and
find momentary, if provisional, articulation. Lee Spinks helpfully explains the
centrality of the patient’s body in similar terms:
For Hana the patient represents an aspect of her lost paternal relation; for Caravaggio
his image symbolizes the body of the war and his own war-torn body; while for Kip
the patient’s blackened remains offer a ghastly evocation of the ruined colonial body:
a body fought over and ceaselessly remade in the image of its antagonists . . . [the true
identity of the patient] is therefore both crucial and curiously beside the point: its
continuing life is inseparable from its fantasmic appropriation by others. (Spinks 176)

Spinks’s reading is representative of earlier analyses by Ajay Heble, Ray-

mond Younis, Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, and others.2 It also reminds us that
the patient himself, even if he was Almásy, has been in a sense “reborn” by the
plane crash, has taken on a new identity and is as separate from his previous life
as any of the other characters. Spinks imagines the English patient as an anointed
Christ figure, a “mythopoetic conversion of flesh into symbol . . . a redemptive
body” (Spinks 176, emphasis original), the association further reinforced when
we are told that Hana has converted an old crucifix into a scarecrow for her gar-
den — a transformation that both redeems and “scares off” the past, keeping it at
safe distance (207).
But understanding the patient’s body entirely or only through an allegori-
cal Christian schema ignores the thematic “claiming” present even before the
attempted murder-suicide or Katharine’s death. Almásy’s return to claim Katha-
rine’s body is a gesture that partially — but only partially — rescinds his earlier
insistence that he remain sovereign or autonomous from history, his longing to
“Erase the family name! Erase nations!” (139). To reclaim Katharine’s body is to
acknowledge a responsibility to reclaim the past. But it is also a desire to reclaim
Katharine from the past. Claiming thus functions as an attempt to get beyond
melancholic repetition, to develop a relationship with the past that does not

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Michael Ondaatje and the Body of History 151

merely oscillate between what Caruth describes as a “double telling . . . between

the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable
nature of its survival” (7).
At one point, Katharine overhears Almásy talking to himself: “She had
blown out the other candles, lit just the night stub at the bedside table and
sat there, the Englishman’s body facing her in silence after the wildness of his
drunken speeches. ‘Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound. A hog, a headless
bear, sometime a fire’ ” (115). Neither Hana nor the patient identify the allusion,
but it is of course a reference Puck’s quizzical remark, immediately after he gives
Nick Bottom an ass’s head, during the mechanicals’ performance of Pyramus
and Thisbe within Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The identification
with fire is both a recollection of his past — his body on fire while parachuting
from the rotted plane — and a refusal to be beholden to that past, or to Hana,
Caravaggio, or Kip’s needs to appropriate the image of his body to work through
their own traumatic experiences. His identification with Puck is in this way a kind
of reclaiming of himself rather than a reclaiming of a traumatic experience. The
text is carefully structured, then, as a series of mutually exclusive contradictions,
refusing to conform to the logic of narrative mourning or melancholia that it so
readily invites.
This is what is so curious about The English Patient. It clearly invites readers to
understand it as a story about star-crossed lovers, jealousy, traumatic experience,
or colonialism — yet each mode of reading it invites it also inevitably frustrates.
The English patient is a Christ figure even as he plays the part of Puck; he is a
redemptive body making the previously unassimilated, unarticulated word into
flesh, while at the same time functioning as the site of a “bottomless dream,” a
blackened pool, an erased past. Over the course of the novel, he becomes a bot-
tomless bag of mixed metaphors: a map without coordinates, a book composed
simultaneously of both truth and lies whose meaning lies not on the inside but on
the outside, in the way that he is imagined or transformed by those around him.
He is as much Christ as he is Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz. And the patient is aware of
this somewhat precarious position, evident when he reprimands Caravaggio: “You
must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some
creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors,
lies . . .” (253).
The associations between history, text, map, and body eventually converge
when Caravaggio administers the truth serum to the patient. Caravaggio first
asks about patient’s location when trying to fly out of the desert with Katharine’s
body. The patient asks for a copy of Kipling’s Kim and uses the map in the book’s
opening pages to explain:
. . . On the frontispiece of Kim was a map with a dotted line for the path the boy
and the Holy One took. It showed just a portion of India — a darkly cross-hatched
Afghanistan, and Kashmir in the lap of the mountains.

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152 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 2

He traces his black hand along the Numi River till it enters the sea at 23°30’
latitude. He continues sliding his finger seven inches west, off the page, onto his
chest; he touches his rib.
“Here. The Gilf Kebir, just north of the Tropic of Cancer. On the Egyptian-
Libyan border.” (167)

The patient’s gesture, away from the map and over his rib cage, is significant. His
body, an extension of the map, is the “site” of history, his heart and his past buried
alongside Katharine in the desert that he has left behind. But it also a gesture that
emphasizes an absent or lost map, a history that cannot be seen and so, in spite of
Caravaggio’s questions, cannot be read, will not allow itself to become a “creature
. . . tempted” into revealing itself.
Immediately after he locates the Gilf Kebir between the ribs of his body,
the story that the English patient tells Caravaggio is doubly loaded: “Leaving
the truck, I started walking towards Uweinat, where I knew there was a buried
plane,” Caravaggio amazed, responding, “Wait. What do you mean, a buried
plane?” (168). The patient is referring literally to Madox’s old plane abandoned by
the exploration team, soon covered by the sandstorms, after Clifton’s plane proves
to be a superior replacement: “None of us thought we would see it again. It was
another victim of the desert” (168). As suggested before, to return and reclaim
the “buried” plane is also to return to Katharine’s body and recover her from the
past, from his betrayal of her. But the futile attempt to recover and fly off with the
buried plane is also synonymous with Caravaggio’s need — along with Hana and
Kip — to recover or claim Almásy’s burned body for their own purposes.
In this way, The English Patient is about reading history, and it is also about
the impossibility of reading history. As readers, we are invited to read the patient’s
body along with Hana, Caravaggio, and Kip but, along with them, the only past
that we have access to is a mediated, occluded, and limited one. The patient’s
blackened body makes history visible and simultaneously marks it “off the page,”
locking it away beneath the patient’s ribs. The gesture to his own body is a sym-
bolic act that claims the self as a site of both personal and public history, but
it is also a double gesture, an act that represents the patient’s refusal to remain
beholden to Caravaggio’s insistence that the patient articulate or reveal that past.
We eventually discover that Caravaggio has also suffered traumatic experi-
ence during the war, for which the Allies had trained him to invent fictional
“double agents” to deceive the Germans. When discussing Caravaggio’s work as
an agent, the English patient accuses Caravaggio of having “an absurd name”;
Caravaggio responds, “At least I have a name” (116). But then the English patient
provides Caravaggio with another kind of history lesson altogether, reminding
Caravaggio of his namesake, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610),
the famous Italian Renaissance painter:
“There’s a painting by [Michelangelo] Caravaggio, done late in his life. David with
the Head of Goliath. In it, the young warrior holds at the end of his outstretched arm
the head of Goliath, ravaged and old. But that is not the true sadness in the picture. It

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Michael Ondaatje and the Body of History 153

is assumed that the face of David is a portrait of the youthful Caravaggio and the
head of Goliath is a portrait of him as an older man, how he looked when he did
the painting. Youth judging age 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.” (116)

All of the villa inhabitants, including the patient himself, are figural Caravag-
gios — both Caravaggio the painter and David Caravaggio whose “outstretched
hand” claims the patient’s body and insists on its otherness and distance from
his own. Although the English patient does not mention this, it is revealing to
note that Michelangelo Caravaggio painted this version of the scene twice, one
portrait with the young David looking heroically off to the side (Figure 1), and
the second with a more compassionate, even regretful David, contemplating the
head he has severed and which he has claimed as his own (Figure 2). The severed
head is its own traumatic testimony. Its mouth — one of the only details that
Caravaggio does not change between his two versions of the portrait — is always
open, but mute.
The doubled painting appropriately echoes the double gesture at play in
The English Patient: its multiple versions simultaneously represent the past and
highlight their inability to capture or represent the past in any single, definite, or
objective way. It claims and disclaims at the same time, anticipating Kip’s final
judgment of the patient and of the West — “American, French, I don’t care. When
you start bombing the brown races of the world, you’re an Englishman” (286).
Despite Kip’s critique of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he eventu-
ally acknowledges his own responsibility as a participant in the war. Against
the advice of his brother, Kip chose to aid the Allies, and while reflecting on
this choice his language both links in with Caravaggio’s painting and with his
accusation of the patient: “What have I been doing these last few years? Cutting
away, defusing, limbs of evil. For what? For this to happen?” (285). Kip, along
with Hana and David Caravaggio, have each attempted to “defuse,” to “cut away
. . . [the] limbs” of their own pasts, and to reclaim them at the same time. The
accusation — you’re an Englishman — is as much a subconscious accusation of
himself as it is of the patient.
How then do we reconcile the clearly politicized, postcolonial dimension
of this novel with its insistent resistance to historical or political “truth”? It is
worthwhile here to pause and return to an earlier question: what is the effect of
imagining the relation between The English Patient and the book within it, the
patient’s heavily annotated copy of Herodotus’ Histories? The extended descrip-
tion of the desert winds and their names — dozens of them — included in his
Herodotus notebook provides us with a clue. Hana picks up his copy of Herodotus
and reads the catalog of wind names recorded by Almásy, but then comes across
a passage about the winds without names:
There are other, less constant winds that change direction, that can knock down
horse and rider and realign themselves anticlockwise . . . the ————, the secret

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154 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 2

Figure 1: David with the Head of Goliath (c. 1607) by Michelangelo Caravaggio (1571–1610);
Kunsthistorisches Museum Gemäldegalerie, Vienna.

Figure 2: David with the Head of

Goliath (c. 1610) by Michelangelo
Caravaggio (1571–1610); Galleria
Borghese, Rome.

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Michael Ondaatje and the Body of History 155

wind of the desert, whose name was erased by a king after his son died within it.
. . . Herodotus records the death of various armies engulfed in the simoom who were
never seen again. One nation was “so enraged by this evil wind that they declared war
on it and marched out in full battle array, only to be rapidly and completely interred.”
. . . She looks up from the book and sees his eyes on her. He begins to talk across
the darkness. (16–17)

The wind that has no name, the simoom that buries its adversaries in the sand:
all of these winds are figures of history that cannot, like the patient’s body, be
captured, mapped, identified, or contained. They are pasts that cannot be fully
erased nor fully articulated.
Similarly, Almásy falls deeply in love with a certain part of Katharine’s body,
the hollow at the base of her neck, and asks Madox whether or not that part of a
body has a name (162), although Madox dismisses his question. Forced to invent
his own name, Almásy christens it himself: “There was a small indentation at
her throat we called the Bosphorus. I would dive from her shoulder into the
Bosphorus” (236). The name is significant: the Bosphorus is the roughly thirty-
kilometer strait in Turkey that divides Europe from Asia, and that connects the
Black Sea with the Aegean. It is thus simultaneously a geographical feature that
both connects and divides, a bridge and, at the same time, a wall. It also antici-
pates one of the final images in the text: Kip turning too fast in the rain while
driving over a bridge on his motorbike, sliding off the bike and into the water
below. “The motorbike and soldier stilled in midair, then pivoted down into the
water, the metal body between his legs as they slammed into it, jarring a white
path through it, disappearing, the rain too entering the river. ‘He will toss thee like
a ball into a large country’ ” (295). In this moment, Kip becomes a member of the
“Cave of Swimmers,” too. The allusion to Isaiah — with whom Kip is continually
associated in the novel — implying that his return to India is also in some sense
an exile from his own past.
The film adaptation of The English Patient reveals little of Kip’s story. It
removes his entire history with Lord Suffolk and transforms Kip almost entirely
into a figure of the colonial Other, the Empire writing back to its colonizers.
But Kip’s work as a sapper also provides a kind of skeleton key for unlocking the
numerous doubled images throughout the text. Early on, we are told that “the
successful defusing of a bomb ended novels” (105), which, as Lee Spinks has also
pointed out, ironically anticipates the ending of The English Patient. The bomb-
ings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki inadvertently cause the small and somewhat
haphazard cast of characters at the Villa San Girolamo to separate almost as
suddenly as they have come together. For Spinks, The English Patient can be read
as “the story of Kip’s gradual recognition that there is no private space untouched
by the ‘public battles’ between imperial power and the emerging forces of colonial
independence. This recognition, when it arrives, will tear the world of the villa
apart, revealing Kip to be . . . the unexploded bomb concealed at the heart of the
novel” (Spinks 198). Although I agree with Spinks, we might wonder: is Kip the

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156 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 2

only unexploded bomb? Is not the English patient’s body itself, inextricably linked
to his copy of Herodotus and thus history itself, and ministered to in various ways
by the villa’s inhabitants, not also a kind of bomb? If so, is he in the end a bomb
exploded, or a bomb defused?
Ondaatje completed a great deal of research concerning bomb defusion and
disposal while writing The English Patient, and his descriptions of Kip’s work are
remarkably detailed.3 There is also a clear resonance between Kip’s work defus-
ing bombs and Caravaggio’s work in piecing together the patient’s identity. At
one point, Kip attempts to defuse a bomb that he finds very close to the villa:
“There were six wires jumbled up, tied together, all painted black. He brushed
the dust off the mapboard the wires lay on. Six black wires . . . this opponent had
not just concreted the thing but painted all the characters black. Kip was being
pulled into a psychological vortex . . .” (99). The wires, all painted black, echo
the patient’s burned body — Caravaggio quips that the English patient need not
worry about alcohol affecting his health: “Nothing will kill you, my friend. You
are pure carbon” (109). But, like the community at the villa, it is a body dispersed,
black wires arranged, even tangled together on the “mapboard” of the bomb. The
defusion proves too complicated for Kip, and he ends up holding two live wires
that he cannot put down without a descant chord. Hana finds him and helps him
complete the work, though Kip warns her: “We have an impasse. There’s a joke. I
don’t know where to go from here. I don’t know how complete the trick is” (101). A
poet with a love for unusual nomenclature, it is unsurprising that Ondaatje makes
extensive use of the rather ironic description of violent machines as composed of
“jokes” and “tricks,” but the allusion to them is more than simply ironic.
The English Patient is to a certain degree one giant “trick” fused with a second
“joke.” All of the characters must, as in this scene where Hana and Kip work
together, defuse each other. Even Caravaggio, who in the middle of a robbery
can’t help but feel annoyed when the windows of an advent calendar haven’t been
opened to the correct date, and pauses to take time to fix them, is also a kind of
sapper, a “defuser” of time. Kip’s final fall into the river beneath the bridge, the
“metal body” of the motorbike beneath him a doubled image of the ruined plane
that Almásy attempts to fly out of the desert with Katharine’s body, is also a per-
formative — though unplanned — gesture that returns Hana’s love even as it oper-
ates as a kind of baptism, both a break from and tie back to Kip’s past in the West.
Earlier, when Kip defuses the bomb with Hana’s help, Hana “dives” (like
Almásy with Katharine and Kip into the river) into his body:
. . . We have this villa this grass, we should have lain down together, you in my arms,
before we died. I wanted to touch that bone at your neck, collarbone, it’s like a small
hard wing under your skin. I wanted to place my fingers against it. I’ve always liked
flesh the colour of rivers and rocks or like the brown eye of a Susan, do you know
what that flower is? Have you seen them? I am so tired, Kip, I want to sleep. I want
to sleep under this tree, put my eye against your collarbone I just want to close my

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Michael Ondaatje and the Body of History 157

eyes without thinking of others, want to find the crook of a tree and climb into it
and sleep. (103)

Hana’s desire to climb into Kip’s body and sleep marks a possible “defusion” of
history counteracts the detonation of the atomic bomb at the end of the text, even
if this disarmament is ultimately a limited, precarious, and personal gesture that
does not change the course of history in a larger national or political sense. This
is part of The English Patient’s desire, like its characters, to attain some autonomy
from officially sanctioned histories of the past, to exist both within and above
the fray of those histories. For example, when Hana and Kip first sleep together,
Kip cuts the English patient’s hearing aid so that their night together will pass
unnoticed, Kip promising, “I’ll rewire him in the morning” (115). The English
patient — a character whose baptism by fire has also clearly separated him from
his earlier identity as Almásy — is in the end both Christ and Shakespeare’s
Puck, a redeemer of history and the one who orchestrates the text’s “bottomless”
midsummer night’s dream. We can read the English patient, as Kip does, as the
ruined colonial body, but he is also a Kurtz figure whose meaning lies in not on
the inside, like a kernel, but on the outside, like a haze.
This makes any assessment of the politics of The English Patient a bit more
slippery than we might first surmise. It is a text that consciously and repeatedly
underscores the problems of colonialism. As many of its critics have pointed
out, it frames that critique especially through the ways that it subverts the major
symbols and rhetorical machines used to legitimize imperialist ventures: officially
sanctioned histories of the world and the cartographical maps with which they
are paired. Madhumalati Adhikari argues that The English Patient is an “anti-war
novel,” and he romanticizes the text by claiming that Ondaatje wants to “sug-
gest how human beings have always searched for the silver lining despite the
devastation [of war] and [the] devaluation of values” that have resulted from war
(Adhikari 43). But The English Patient is far more problematic than that, suspi-
cious and even critical of its own longing to rise above the fray of history, politics,
and nation. The final image is of Hana dropping a glass in her kitchen. At the
same moment, half a world away, Kip’s daughter drops a fork, and Kip’s hands
sweep down and catch it just before it hits the floor. This image binds Hana and
Kip together, but is also an inevitable reminder that they are apart and that — in
all likelihood — the glass that Hana drops crashes onto the floor beneath her.
The passage claims and disclaims a connection between the two, invites and
simultaneously frustrates a romanticized reading of the novel’s conclusion.
Although I have been primarily concerned with the way The English Patient
encodes this double gesture, a longing to “Erase the family name! Erase nations!”
counterweighted with an acknowledgment of one’s responsibility to claim nation
and name as one’s own, the ambivalence registered in these texts offers us a new
way to think about twentieth- and twenty-first century literary history more
broadly. As Susan Stanford Friedman has said, to imagine modernist and postco-
lonial literature as separate or even antagonistic aesthetic enterprises is analogous

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158 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 2

to hearing “one hand clapping,” since so much of postcolonial literature draws

on and retools the aesthetic pyrotechnics of its modernist predecessors.4 This also
involves troubling a traditionally perceived antagonism between postmodern-
ism and postcolonial studies, suggesting that a postmodern critique of historical
objectivity and the aesthetic practices associated with postmodern writing marks
not a disavowal of political responsibility, but a political commitment of a different
kind. Finally, through using some of the critical lenses offered by trauma theory,
I have also hoped to nuance the way we situate an emergent interest in transna-
tionalism. I suggest that even as we acknowledge the importance of thinking
about texts or authors in ways not defined by rigid national paradigms, so much
of twentieth century literature remains in a tense or ambivalent relationship with
a world that — whether we like it or not — is defined by those paradigms.
In “Is the Post in Postmodernism the Post in Postcolonial?”, Kwame Appiah
rightly warns his readers, echoing Sara Suleri, not to treat non-Western texts and
voices simply as “otherness machines . . . with the manufactur[ing] of alterity as
our principal role” (Appiah 356). For Appiah, to read non-Western texts simply as
“non-Western,” as defined and understood entirely by their Otherness, is to repeat
the very colonial act that such a project would claim to subvert. Of course, any
text that uses Herodotus — the father of Western history — as one of its central
thematic tropes is reason enough to categorize The English Patient as a fully West-
ern text. However, the novel is also associated with postcolonial literature or new
literatures in English. Kip’s constant association with the biblical Isaiah further
blurs any sense that the text neatly divides its characters or its worlds into a simple
East and West. This blurring is intentional. In an interview with The Observer,
Ondaatje quotes John Berger: “Never again will a single story be told as though
it were the only one. . . . [This] is the possibility of our age. A person grows up
in Colombo or Wichita and their true mentor or touchstone could be Calvino or
Miles Davis, or it could be a political gesture or act in a far away place” (qtd. in
McCrum, n.p.). Appiah’s point applies to The English Patient, however, because
it helps to explain that what may seem a kind of political escapism — to disavow
politics or history — is also, as I have argued, a kind of political commitment. Kip
is not just an image of the Other, the “ruined colonial body,” and thus simply an
“Otherness machine” within the textual politics of the narrative. He is a character
who shares with the patient a longing to erase names, to erase nations, however
provisionally, even if in the end he must return to reclaim them. To allow Kip that
complexity is to recognize the evolving calculus of identity politics, to see him
as we learn to see the patient: as something more than “a book . . . to be read,”
someone determined — but not fully determined — by his historical horizons.

Notes
1. The southwest coast of Sri Lanka has been dominated by three Sinhala castes distinct from the
Goyigama in the Central Highlands. These include the Karava (fishermen), the Durava (toddy tap-
pers), and Salagama (cinnamon peelers). Although originally of marginal or low status, increased

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Michael Ondaatje and the Body of History 159

social mobility and modernization in the twentieth century have gradually eroded the link between
caste and occupation. See Nubin 153. Cinnamon production was especially encouraged by the Dutch,
who created and expanded numerous cinnamon plantations during the 1770s. See Schrikker 52–77.
2. See Heble 97–110; Younis 2–9; and Tötösy de Zepetnek.
3. Ondaatje identifies A.B. Hartley’s Unexploded Bomb: A History of Bomb Disposal — which he
quotes from at length — as his major source in this area.
4. This is not to imply the postcolonial writing is simply derivative of modernist or postmodern
writing, nor to suggest a model of unidirectional aesthetic diffusion. Rather, it calls for a more flex-
ible or plastic relationship between postcolonial writing and its modernist forbears or postmodern
contemporaries. Ondaatje has repeatedly highlighted the narrative tactics of Joseph Conrad and Ford
Madox Ford, for example, as influential for his own work. See Solecki 322–33.

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