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1
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
2
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
3
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
4
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
5
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
6
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).
7
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
8
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
9
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
10
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
11
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
12
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
13
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
14
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
15
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.
16
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—
17
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
18
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
19
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
20
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
21
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.
22
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.