The English Patient

The Chapter on Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient was published in Le Passioni tra Ostensione e Riserbo edited by Romana Rutelli. The full version can be downloaded here (48kb)

The English Patient And the healing co-ordinates of ‘dailiness’ Janet Lewison

                During the final stages of Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient, one of the protagonists, Caravaggio bids farewell to another, Kirpal Singh with the words, ‘I shall have to learn how to miss you. Such an avowal seems to address and embrace the central concerns of the text, concerns I wish to interrogate in this paper: the problematic representation of loss in The English Patient. This loss isforegrounded through the text’s invested interest in the reestablishment of ‘dailiness’ and routine, which in restoring domestic structures and co-ordinates of the ordinary, enable certain tentative healing narratives to takes place. Furthermore in this investment in ‘dailiness’ the text addresses the role of the ordinary in the inevitable confrontation with mortality. This inevitability is all the more marked as the central character in the novel is barely alive, and therefore saturates all his narratives with a sense of ‘lastness’ and finality. Whether this ‘lastness’ becomes transmuted into sacred experience we shall see during the course of this paper.

            This beautifully evocative admission of Caravaggio, ‘I shall have to learn how to miss you’, situates him in an ambivalent but potentially healing relation to mourning in the text. For ‘I shall have to learn how to miss you’, suggests that the expression and translation of the ‘missing’ of Kip, though difficult and well-nigh impossible in the present moment of telling, has at least some provisional possibility of expression in the future. This ambivalent promise of Caravaggio significantly transcends its literal context and destination by hinting at the possibility for some restabilisation of the I/thou relationship in a world that had all but extinguished any notion of reciprocity, with a war that ended with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

            This cataclysmic curtailment of Japan’s involvement in the war also brings an end to the brief community that had been formed at the villa itself, as the disparate characters are impelled to return to their separate cultures and attempt to reassume their pre-war lives. However, it is my contention in this paper that Caravaggio’s words perfectly capture the transforming ethos of this transiently formed society at the villa, for the words he expresses are only possible and utterable because of the reorienting restorative experiences he has undergone in this singular setting, with his strangely assorted companions, not least of whom is the literally burnt-out figure of the English Patient himself.

            The Patient’s terrible injuries are reflected in the historical context of the novel, for Ondaatje has produced his text against an horrific backdrop of twentieth century shame. The novel is specifically set against a series of apocalyptic events that serve to underline the individual suffering we encounter in the testimonies of the characters at the villa. Indeed it is pertinent to my argument here to refer to these events as ‘caesurae’ in history, gaps or pauses in the apparent relentless linearity of history where language proves insufficient to encompass the terror and inhumanity of such moments. Such a backdrop includes Mussolini’s capitulation against Hitler in 1943, the former’s infamous execution, and the bloody retreat of the German army from Italy in 1945. Auschwitz had finally been liberated by the far from unknowing allies in January 1945 and Japan’s activities in the war ended by the release of two atomic bombs.

            On a macro-level these events form the public historical details that act as frames and contexts for the micro-level of more specifically personal experiences at the ruined villa. Trauma therefore pervades every aspect of Ondaatje’s text, manifesting itself repeatedly through the thwarted narratives of the characters, riddled with pauses or caesurae that serve to highlight the suffering that haunts such necessarily delayed testimonies. The nurse Hana is profoundly affected by the death of her Canadian father Patrick, a loss she can barely acknowledge, let alone express. Her war has been a war impotently fought against the all-encroaching inevitability of serial death. Caravaggio, the resourceful hybrid of thief and spy, has been mutilated into silence and comes to the villa to seek out a familiar bond severed by the war. The Sikh Sapper Kip visits the villa in the course of his military operations and reveals himself as an isolated figure, used by the Allies as a necessary but highly disposable military tool. Finally there is the English Patient himself, an enigmatic figure whose burnt-out physicality and elusive identity fragments his recurring obsession with the death of his great love- Katherine Clifton. The ruined, violated villa temporarily inhabited by this group of profoundly damaged individuals thus reflects the wider situation of the text coming all together in the disfigured remains that is the English Patient himself. I began this paper suggesting that Caravaggio's confession and promise, ‘I shall have to learn how to miss you’ expresses a tentative desire for an admission and articulation of loss for the other, albeit in an unspecified future, and I would now like to interrogate how the desire for the realisation of this avowal might come about.