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Nationality and Textuality in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient

Gregory O'Dea

The following lecture was delivered as part of the Take Five public lecture series on international fiction at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, on May 9, 2006.

The title of this year's Take Five lecture series, like our last, is

"contemporary international fiction." I'll admit I'm not entirely certain what that

phrase means. Given our selections this year and in 2004, we seem to assume it

means fiction written sometime since the middle of the last century, or since the

second world war, originating from countries other than the United States and the

United Kingdom. Honestly, I don't know how contemporary some of it is to some

of us; that may depend on a reader's age. And I don't know how inter-national

some of it is, either; maybe that depends on the breadth of the work's scope and

vision, the degree to which the work and its author are really concerned with

internationality: the whole business of nations, of course, but also the whole other

business of other nations, too: the inter stuff—their inter-relationships, their

interactions, their interpenetrations, their internalizations … and their

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interpretations. But also their divisions, their tensions, their subterfuge, their wars.

Contra-nationality, we might say.

If we can accept that premise, then at least in this year's Take Five series, I

confidently proclaim myself the winner. I'm going to talk a bit about Michael

Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient. We were all alive when it was first

published in 1992, so as a novel it is our contemporary. Its author is Sri Lankan by

birth, and an émigré first to England and then to Toronto. Its story concerns two

Canadians, an Indian Sikh, and a Hungarian count (who is thought to be English)

holed up in a Florentine villa, with flashback memories—those of the Hungarian

count (who is thought to be English)—of a multi-national group of explorers

working in Cairo and the Libyan desert. There's a little bit, a news report, really,

about America and Japan at the end. That's international, folks.

I win.

A few notes on Michael Ondaatje himself. He was born in Sri Lanka (then

called Ceylon) in 1943, of Portuguese-Dutch-Tamil-Sinhalese ancestry. He is, to

use the phrase of one of his characters in The English Patient, an international

mongrel. As a young boy he moved to England with his mother, then to Toronto,

where he attended university and became a Canadian citizen. He is a poet as well

as a novelist, and indeed has won many honors for such verse volumes as There's a

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Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do, Secular Love, and The Cinnamon Peeler.

His creative memoir, Running in the Family, offers a partly fictional account of his

family history and childhood in Sri Lanka. His work of prose poetry, The Collected

Works of Billy the Kid, seems to have led him to the prose novella Coming

Through Slaughter, which imagines the mythical life of New Orleans proto-jazz

cornetist Buddy Bolden. His first proper novel, In the Skin of a Lion, was published

in 1987. Set in Canada during the depression, it features among its minor

characters a thief named David Caravaggio and a teen-aged girl named Hana. Eight

years after The English Patient appeared in 1992, he published the novel Anil's

Ghost, set in the midst of Sri Lanka's ongoing civil war.

Yes, Carravagio and Hana have appeared in Ondaatje's fiction before, if

somewhat distantly. Ondaatje once said in an interview that the English Patient

took him six years to write, and that it wasn't until two or three years into the

project that he realized the nurse he was writing about was Hana, the young girl he

last seen in In the Skin of a Lion. He was quite surprised to find her here, serving as

an army nurse in northern Italy. For Ondaatje, we presume, these characters have

an existence quite apart from his own imagining of them.

But back to the problem of internationalism. Ondaatje's novel is certainly

concerned with nations, internationality, and contra-nationality. If we want to get

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straight to the bottom of what it's "about," we could point to the English Patient's

statement about what his work as a desert explorer taught him. "I came to hate

nations," he says.

We are deformed by nation-states. Maddox died because of

nations … All of us, even those with European homes and children in

the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. … Erase

the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the

desert. …By the time war arrived, after ten years in the desert, it was

easy for me to slip across borders, not to belong to anyone, to any

nation" (138–39).

That's the novel's bottom line, I think, and the idea it wants to investigate:

first, that nations are deforming—that is, they warp essential individual identity by

involving it in the illusory construct of nationalism, of group-think; and second,

that this collective, deranged psychosis of nations, the illusion that they can be

permanent and possessed of the absolute truth, inevitably leads to both large scale

human destruction and the betrayal of individual lives.

Now, we'd like to describe how the English Patient has come to this

conclusion about nations, and how other characters in the book struggle toward it

themselves. If the nightmare of nations is the conclusion, we need a place to begin

talking about it—a point of entry, a door into the novel's interior spaces. There are

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many to choose from. But let me open just one door tonight by talking about The

English Patient as a novel that is deeply concerned with text. Having walked

through that door, I think we'll find that we're able to walk around the whole

edifice of the novel pretty well, as one way of coming at its concerns over nations.

First, understand that I'm construing the term text very, very broadly. By it, I

do not mean only printed words on a page, though that's one manifestation. By text,

I mean any construct that must be "read," in a figurative sense – that must be

deciphered, decoded, interpreted, in order to unearth buried information. Books

and writing, yes, but also art, architecture, music…and, in the case of this novel,

bodies, and memories, and bombs.

I'm going to point to some of the more prominent texts in the novel, and

various attempts in the novel to "read" certain kinds of texts, and we'll see where

this takes us.

The most dominant traditional text in the novel is the copy of Herodotus's

Histories that so fascinates the English Patient himself, and that serves him as a

kind of common-place book or scrap-book. Herodotus's work is of course seminal

to the entire discipline of history and to historiography. Herodotus has been called

famously both the "Father of History" (by Cicero) and the "Father of Lies" (by

Lucian), for Herodotus himself makes clear that much of what he writes is

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conjecture and informed bias. The book itself was written in the 5th century B.C.E.,

and in its account of the wars between Persia and Greece it essentially creates and

informs the entire geo-political and cultural traditions of an "East" and a "West," of

Orientalism and Occidentalism, and the struggles of nations and empires. So we

can see here that the text of the Histories itself, as a prominent proposition and

allusion in Ondaatje's novel, raises the fundamental issues of nations, boundaries,

imperialism, and wars, and also of truth and lies, of fact and fiction. The English

Patient quotes from and refers to the book often and at length, giving us only

fragmentary views of its importance, but certainly enough to realize its general

significance. As he puts it,

I see Herodotus as one of those spare men of the desert who travel

from oasis to oasis, trading legends 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"

(118–119).

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For The English Patient, then, the beauty of Herodotus's history lies in its

mingling of vast scope and small stories, in its lack of discrimination between truth

and fiction, in its all-consuming generosity.

But that accounts only for Herodotus's book as an idea in the novel. We

must also recognize it as an object in the novel—The English Patient doesn't just

talk about Herodotus; he holds the book, caresses it, and carries it with him

through all calamities. It is his one possession. He annotates his copy,

supplementing it with his own texts and observations, as described on page 16: "It

is the book he brought with him through the fire—a copy of The Histories of

Herodotus that he has added too, cutting and gluing in pages from other books or

writing in his own observations—so they are all cradled within the text of

Herodotus." We're told that the English Patient's copy of The Histories is swollen

to twice its original thickness by these other texts with which it is interleaved and

over-written. At various points in the novel, again in bits and fragments, we hear of

the Herodotus volume containing a passage from the Bible (1 Kings); lots of

different maps; diary entries in multiple languages; paragraphs from other books;

references to and reproductions of cave art and gallery art; journal notes; lyrics

from jazz songs; a poem by Stephen Crane; a passage from Milton's Paradise Lost,

spoken by Adam to Eve; a small fern; an article on desert exploration—and

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numerous notes on cigarette papers, glued over sections of the Histories recording

wars that were of no interest to him.

Now, take a moment to picture this text, as Almasy has transformed it. As

I've said, it is rather like a scrap-book, or a common-place book. Herodotus's text,

so valued by the English Patient (an 1890 translation by G. C. McCauley, and so

already transformed), is covered over by other texts and objects of his own

devising. Herodotus is fragmented, then, and partially buried by the thoughts,

memories, keepsakes, and psyche of this particular reader. The whole object is a

kind of palimpsest—that is, a manuscript that has been written on more than once,

with the earlier writing only incompletely erased and still often legible. There are

strata of text here, there's a geology and a landscape here, a partially subsumed and

partially excavated history within the text of The Histories. It is a complicated and

monstrous sort of text that Ondaatje has imagined for us, and it's not hard to see

that in this object the English Patient has created a figure of himself. Or, perhaps,

he has become like the book Almasy created. Like it, he rambles, speaking in

fragments "about oasis towns, the later Medicis, the prose style of Kipling, the

woman who bit into his flesh" (8) and jumping randomly among a bewildering

variety of other topics. And like the Herodotus book, the English Patient is not

what he seems to be, if judged only by his cover. Some of what he has to say may

be truth. Some may not be. And maybe, in the end, such distinctions don't really

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matter. The presence of this text in the novel says a great deal about the

intersections between the grand sweep of history and its cul-de-sacs, about nations

and the individual.

Now, I said earlier that texts are things that need to be decoded, deciphered,

and interpreted. I want to stick with the Herodotus text a little longer and let this

play into other texts in Ondaatje's novel. Why is the copy of Herodotus so

important to the English Patient? I've said that it is a figure of the patient himself, a

kind of repository of thought, memory, and feeling that takes on the character of its

creator. And so it is. But what has made him this way, so full and so shattered at

the same time, and what has he then in turn shaped the book to be? The answer,

simply put, is love and history, or what he claims is Herodotus's great subject:

"how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how people fall in love." Or,

as he puts the question at one point, "How does this happen? To fall in love and be

disassembled" (158). The intersection of national interests—the international, the

contra-national—and individual human beings. The answer, even more simply put,

is Katherine Clifton.

What does he say made him fall in love with Katherine? Her reading aloud,

before a group but really to him, passages from Herodotus, and Stephen Crane, and

Milton. The world's history and literature, made personal. These things are in his

Herodotus scrap-book. Where did they meet? In the desert, as part of an

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international exploratory expedition—the public maps of their personal desert are

in the scrap-book, too. Where did they make love? In all sorts of places, but

notably in rooms where images of maps and gardens covered the walls. What was

the tenor of their affair? Mad, insanely passionate, violent —all figured in one way

or another in the scrap-book. The lyrics of music they danced to and listened to, the

fern leaf from a Cairo hotel. Those cigarette papers? A list of Katherine's

arguments against him. It is not merely or generally a random collection of The

English Paient's odd thoughts, ideas, and interests. It is a textual figuration of

Katherine Clifton and himself—of their history, and of their intimacy.

But The English Patient has always made Katherine over into text, encoding

her in metaphor, as if it were impossible to do anything else or to preserve her in

any other way. He describes his writing of a scholarly monograph Recent

Explorations in the Libyan Desert this way:

I was coming closer and closer to the text as if the desert were there

somewhere on the page, so I could even smell the ink as it emerged

from the fountain pen. And simultaneously struggled with her nearby

presence, more obsessed if truth be known with her possible mouth,

the tautness behind the knee, the white plain of stomach, as I wrote

my brief book, seventy pages long, succinct and to the point, complete

with maps of travel. I was unable to remove her body from the page. I

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wanted to dedicate the monograph to her, to her voice, to her body

that I imagined rose white out of a bed like a long bow, but it was a

book I dedicated to a king (235).

And, as the English Patient admits to Caravaggio in that beautiful line, "Her

gardens were the gardens I spoke of when I spoke to you of gardens" (236). Here is

Katherine encoded as text, buried and preserved in metaphor, like an ancient and

mysterious artifact is preserved under the desert.

And why did their affair end? In part, because Katherine feared her

husband's jealousy. An old story, of course, but caught up nevertheless in the

jealousies of nations. As the world of nations inches toward the brink of war, a

man and a woman have begun an illicit affair. But the woman's husband is a covert

British agent posing as a neutral civilian desert explorer. Almasy's affair with

Katherine triggered security concerns. She ended it while protecting her husband's

identity. Her husband found out later, and attempted a suicide-murder via a plane

crash in the desert. Individual dramas tangled in the affairs of nations, and now

mingling as yet another story, another cul-de-sac of history, coded and cradled in

the text of Herodotus.

Almasy falls in love with Katherine, he says, because she read to him.

Because of her voice. This leads us to another set of texts in the novel, since that

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act of reading aloud is repeated years later, in the Villa San Girolamo north of

Florence, where Hana reads to the English Patient at his bedside.

First, let's think about what she reads to him. The Villa apparently has a

decent library, and she reads specifically from Rudyard Kipling (Kim), James

Fenimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans), and Daniel Defoe (Robinson

Crusoe), and there are some allusions to Tacitus, Stendahl, and a few others. What

do these works have in common? Each is concerned with the encounter between

the Western European and the "other" – the English and the East Indian, in

Kipling's novel; the English and the North American Indian, in Cooper's case; and

the English and the West Indian, in Defoe's account. White men and Brown

people—and we know how that story goes, tangled as it has always been with the

history of empire and nationalism.

Second, let's think about the reading method itself. Hana reads aloud until

the English Patient falls asleep, sometimes taking lessons in elocution from him, as

when she reads Kipling:

Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch

carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural

pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the

page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds,

as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of

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birds, but her did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think

about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first

paragraph it is otherwise (94).

Once the English Patient has fallen asleep, Hana then moves away to another part

of the Villa and continues reading silently on her own.

So the gaps for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had

gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing

incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster

loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night. The

Villa that she and the Englishman inhabited now was much like that

(8).

The delivery of the text is fragmented, both by Hana's skipping ahead in the

book, and by the English Patient's interruptions to tell Hana to mind the pauses.

There are gaps created in his reception, and gaps to be observed in the full text

itself. Like the English Patient's Herodotus text, these bedtime stories are

fragmented and layered, coded and evocative.

Hana recognizes the connection between these textual fragments, their

encoded strata of meaning, and the villa itself, which forms a kind of fragmented,

historical text—at first it was a renaissance mansion, then transformed to a

nunnery, and more lately used as a German army headquarters, then an Allied field

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hospital, and now stands as a ruinous shelter for four of the war's damaged

refugees. And the text of this building requires a reader, too—one provided as he

seems to step out of the pages of Kipling's novel—not the fictional KIM, but

Kirpal Singh, or KIP, the Indian sapper. Kip first appears in the novel as he hears

Hana's piano playing, rushing to stop her reading of the music lest it detonate a

bomb, wired to the piano or hidden elsewhere in the villa. Kip has come to save

Hana, in a sense, from misreading the text of the Villa—a dangerous place

disguised as a refuge from the war—just as the English Patient saves her from

misreading Kipling, and as Caravaggio comes to save her from misreading the

English Patient. All of these things—the villa, the bedtime stories, the English

Patient himself—are texts made dangerous by the very idea of nations, and they

must be read with great care. Let me talk about Caravaggio for a few minutes, and

turn to Kip and his texts before coming back to back to the English Patient himself.

If Kirpal Singh seems to arise from the pages of Kipling's novel, then David

Caravaggio re-embodies the great figure of Natty Bumpo from James Fenimore

Cooper's Leatherstocking tales, including The Last of the Mohicans. This character

has many names in Cooper's fiction: the Deerslayer, Leatherstocking, the

Pathfinder, and Hawkeye; he is a tracker, a go-between, a spy, a thief. As he

appears in The Last of the Mohicans, he is middle aged, and his mission in that

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novel is to escort and protect a pair of young women from the dangers of the

French and Indian War. The connections to Ondaatje's Caravaggio are plain

enough, and perhaps Hana herself recognizes them on some level when she

inscribes Caravaggio on some back pages of her copy of Cooper's novel: "There is

a man named Caravaggio," she writes, "a friend of my father's. I have always loved

him. He is older than I am, about forty-five, I think. He is in a time of darkness, has

no confidence. For some reason I am cared for by this friend of my father's" (61).

Of course, Hana is following the English Patient's lead here, and beginning to

construct her own commonplace book in a hauntingly appropriate text about wars

and nations and the people who must live with them and between them.

Caravaggio comes to the Villa San Girolamo to save Hana, whom he thinks

has "tied [herself] to a corpse for some reason … a twenty-year-old who throws

herself out of the world to love a ghost" (45). Hana thinks of the English Patient as

a "despairing saint" (45) with the "hipbones of Christ"— as someone she can love

and care for, as a replacement for her step-father, Patrick Lewis, who was killed in

the war. (Patrick, by the way, is the main protagonist of Ondaatje's previous novel,

In the Skin of a Lion.) Possibly a replacement, too, for the young soldier whom she

had loved, also killed in the war. Caravaggio believes that Hana cannot stay in this

dangerous Villa, and cannot tie herself to this man, whoever he is.

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And of course, it is the identity of the English Patient that obsesses

Caravaggio. At one point, he considers inventing the Patient's identity in order to

prise Hana away from him:

"He needs to know who this Englishman from the desert is, and reveal

him for Hana's sake. Or perhaps invent a skin for him, the way tannic

acid camouflages a burned man's rawness. Working in Cairo during

the early days of the war, he had been trained to invent double agents

or phantoms who would take on flesh. He had lived through the time

of war when everything offered up to those around him was a lie. But

here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what

they were. There was no defense but to look for the truth in others"

(117).

Here, Caravaggio views the English Patient as a kind of text; the only question is

whether he is a text to be read, interpreted, excavated, and revealed, or one to be

written over, buried under a new skin, and re-created as a fiction. The English

Patient himself is thus seen a palimpsest, like his copy of Herodotus, a dangerous

and ambiguous kind of text, written over many times. Caravaggio sees that

"reading" the Patient, rather than "writing" him, is the only possibility in this place,

at the end of an international war, where they are all shedding false skins—

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possibly, as the English Patient puts it, "removing the clothing of their countries."

Caravaggio must get at the truth, rather than invent a lie.

What he gets at, though, is a complicated thing. His theory is that the

English Patient is in fact not English at all, but a man named Almasy, a Hungarian

desert explorer turned spy-helper for the Germans. Let me take a moment to

remind us that Count Ladislau or Laszlo Almasy was a real person, an historical

figure, though greatly transformed by Ondaatje to become a fictional figure in this

novel. Some notes on the historical Almasy might be helpful, but I will follow the

notes with a warning.

The historical Almasy was born in 1895 in a part of Hungary that is now

within the borders of Austria. Like Ondaatje's character, he was a self-taught desert

explorer and pilot, and in the 1930s he took part in several international

expeditions, notably with British explorers, to find Zerzura, a legendary lost city

buried in the deserts of Egypt, or Libya, perhaps in the valleys of the Gilf Kebir. In

the early 1940s, the historical Almasy worked for the Germans under Rommel's

command as a desert guide, helping spies find their way across the shifting borders

of the North African theater. He may have been a double-agent, though, delivering

intelligence to the British as well. After the war, he spent time in a Russian prison,

and then was tried for treason by the new communist regime in Hungary, but

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escaped, perhaps with the help of British intelligence. On a visit to Salzburg in

1951, he became ill and died of dysentery.

That's a brief outline of the historical Almasy. Now for the warning: we

should not make a simple equation between this man and the character in

Ondaatje's novel. This is not, fact-for-fact, even the person whom Caravaggio

believes the English Patient to be. Ondaatje certainly borrows some facts from

Almasy's life and his name, but this is only part of the complex, stratified text of

the character in the novel. Indeed, what Ondaatje seems to have borrowed most

significantly from the historical Almasy is his ambiguity. Did he really discover

the legendary Zerzura, as he once claimed to have done? Or, as some historians

and scholars believe, was he using the name Zerzura only as a metaphor for the

endless quest of exploration? Was he an agent only for the Germans during the

war, or did he spy for the British, too? In either case, what would have been his

motivations? These are some of the questions surrounding the historical Almasy,

and Ondaatje doesn't really attempt to answer them. Instead, he borrows the

ambiguity itself in creating his English Patient as a complex text—a text that

Caravaggio, in particular, feels he must read and interpret.

Here's what Caravaggio comes up with, though only after crudely drugging

the patient and subjecting him to some rather leading interrogation (more

ambiguity, then, surrounding Caravaggio's conclusions). The English Patient is

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Almasy, known to allied intelligence as a spy helper. Before the war, he was an

internationally-neutral desert explorer who fell in love and began an affair with the

wife of one of his associates, an undercover British agent named Geoffrey Clifton.

The affair ended. Clifton found out about it later, and attempted to kill all three of

them by crashing his plane, with Katherine as a passenger, into Almasy in the

desert. Clifton died in the attempt, Almasy survived, and Katherine was mortally

injured. Almasy sheltered Katherine in the Cave of Swimmers and made the long

journey out of the desert to seek help. He was captured by German forces and

made to serve as a guide, particularly for Hans Eppler, also known as "The

Rebecca Spy" (another text, by the way, another palimpsest). In his criss-crossings

of the desert, Almasy attempted to return for Katherine, though she was by now

certainly dead. When he did manage to find her again, he repaired a plane that had

been buried in the desert, loaded he body aboard, and flew away – only the plane

caught fire, and he fell burning from the sky back into the desert, where he was

tended to by Bedouin nomads until he was taken to an Allied hospital. We know

the story from there.

All of this is pieced together by Caravaggio from fragments—sketchy

intelligence reports he had already, bits and pieces from the English Patient's

Herodotus text, snatches from the rambling narrative given by the Patient himself

while under the influence of too much morphine. In the process of "reading" the

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English Patient and interpreting him as Almasy, though, Caravaggio learns to love

him. He'd wanted to save Hana from him, and perhaps to exact revenge for his own

mutilation under the knives of the Germans, but in reading the English Patient, he

also finds a version of himself—a spy, a thief, a wildly romantic and poetic soul.

Like Hana, who interprets the English Patient as something she needs, a saint, a

father-figure, a lover—Caravaggio's reading of Almasy is personal and self-

reflective.

Let me turn now to Kirpal Singh, to Kip, and his texts. I have at least two

intertwined texts in mind here: the English Patient, again—for everyone reads and

interprets that text—and bombs.

As I've said, much of Kip's time around San Girolamo during that summer of

1945 is taken up with "reading" the villa and its grounds—unearthing the hiding

places of booby traps, excavating the war's hidden history there. Decoding and

disposing of bombs. It's something he's devoted his career to doing. We learn most

about Kip in the section entitled "In Situ," which of course means "in its place,"

and in sapper terminology refers to the need to dispose of a bomb as one finds it,

without moving it. But this section of the novel also details Kip's training as a

sapper, his first-hand encounter with the English culture—and his feeling very

much out of place. As an Indian, of course, he has long had a distant view of the

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English; India is at this time part of the British Empire, after all. But his military

training under Lord Suffolk, his mentor, has revealed in him a long standing

admiration of the English, and of Western European culture in general—a culture

to which he wishes to belong, though he cannot. His relationship with Lord Suffolk

has taught him to love the English, but also that his place among them is fragile, at

best. Recall that Kip's older brother is a political agitator against British rule in

India, a view to which Kip cannot subscribe. Recall, too, Kip's worshipful

adoration of the cathedral frescoes, the white marble Italian statues, the madonnas

and prophets; indeed, he falls in love with Hana partly because she seems like one

of his virgin madonnas come to life, even as he seems to her a figure from a

Kipling novel. And the English Patient, too—whom he calls "uncle"—is read by

Kip as quintessentially English, and becomes a replacement of sorts for Lord

Suffolk, another surrogate father lost to the war.

And then there is again the matter of bombs as texts. Time prohibits my

quoting them in full, but I refer you to the novel's engrossing descriptions of Kip

defusing a bomb in situ — the first on pages 98–99, the second on pages 190–199,

and their very plain figuration of the bomb as a kind of text, one that must be read

and understood in order to be defused. The English Patient remembers engaging in

much the same process when he was used by the Bedouins to "read" or "translate"

the makes of buried guns. Another kind of text that reveals much about its author.

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Now, think for a moment about what it would mean to a young man who

had spent his career defusing bombs, preventing them from exploding and killing,

to hear about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as Kip does over

his wireless radio near the novel's end. He's already discovered new innovations in

bomb design, new land-mining techniques, as he's gone about his work in this war.

He's thought a great deal about what a bomb can reveal about its designer. But to

hear about this…a bomb the text of which cannot be read and defused, deployed

against entire cities—and, as he realizes, against cities of Brown people, by the

English ("you're all English," he says), by these people he has come to love. It is

thoroughly devastating. Kip, who seems to Hana to have stepped out of the text of

a Kipling novel about the white man's burden, a reader of bombs, has heard of the

great unreadable text, one that brings his entire world to an end. As he says bitterly

while leveling a rifle at the English Patient:

I grew up with traditions from my country, but later, more often, from

your country. Your fragile white island that with customs and

manners and books and prefects and reason somehow converted the

rest of the world. You and then the Americans converted us. With

your missionary rules. You had wars like cricket. How did you fool us

into this? My brother told me. Never turn your back on Europe. The

deal makers. The contract makers. The map drawers. What have I

23

been doing these last few years? Cutting away, defusing, limbs of evil.

For what? For this to happen? (283–85)

Caravaggio explains to Kip that Almasy isn't an Englishman, and Kip replies,

American, French, I don't care. When you start bombing the brown

races of the world, you're an Englishman. You had King Leopold of

Belgium and now you have Harry Truman of the USA. You all

learned it from the English. (286)

And Caravaggio admits to himself that Kip is right; "They would never have

dropped such a bomb on a white nation." (286).

We're told earlier in the novel, at the beginning of the section entitled

"Sometime a Fire," that "The last medieval war was fought in Italy in 1943–44"

(69). That might seem a puzzling statement, but it presages Caravaggio's thought

near the novel's end, that this nuclear bomb means "a new war. The death of a

civilization" (286). There can be no quaintly bombed-out villa in Hiroshima or

Nagasaki, no leftover bombs for Kip to read, interpret, and defuse. And Kip?

He feels all the winds of the world have been sucked into Asia. He

steps away from the many small bombs of his career towards a bomb

the size, it seems, of a city, so vast it lets the living witness the death

of the population around them. He knows nothing about the weapon.

Whether it was a sudden assault of metal and explosion or if boiling

24

air scoured itself towards and through anything human. All he knows

is, he can no longer let anything approach him, cannot eat the food or

even drink from a puddle on a stone bench on the terrace. He does not

feel he can draw a match out of his bag and fire the lamp, for he

believes the lamp will ignite everything. In the tent, before the light

evaporated, he had brought out the photograph of his family and

gazed at it. His name is Kirpal Singh and he does not know what he is

doing here. (287)

Earlier in the novel, we're told that Kip cannot enter a room without thinking of the

possibility of bombs there. Now, the "English," as Kip would say, or Europe, or the

West, seems to have made the whole world into a bomb. And what, then, does this

bomb say about its designers? In this moment, the whole nightmare of nations

leaps into a new dimension. In this moment, for all of Ondaatje's characters, the

text of the world—its books and maps, its art and music, its bodies and its history,

its very geography—explodes.

I've tried this evening to make the case that The English Patient is at least in

part about the nightmare of nations, and that examining the novel's evident concern

with textuality is one way—but only one way—to approach that idea. There are

many others, and perhaps we can talk about some of them after the break.