Around three a.m. he feels a presence in the room. He sees for a pulse of moment, a figure at the foot of the bed, against the wall or painted onto it perhaps, not quite discernible in the darkness of foliage beyond the candleight . He mutters something he had wanted to say, but there is silence and the slight brown figure, which could be just a night shadow, does not move. A poplar. A man with plumes. A swimming figure. And he would not be so lucky, he thinks, to speak to the young sapper again….
If the figure turns around there will be paint on his back, where he slammed in grief against the mural of trees. When the candle dies out he will be able to see this.
He hand reaches out slowly and touches his book and returns to his dark chest. Nothing else moves in the room.’ ( Ondaatje, The English Patient)
‘When the candle dies out he will be able to see this.’
The illumination granted the English Patient transcends any literal and profane act of seeing. The pulse that separates life from death is captured through the rhythm of Ondaatje’s prose. Memories fuse together and are undifferentiated and free. The pain of separation from the other and from this experience and that is released.
The unindentified visitor at the bed of the dying patient engenders a palpable sense of the sacred as petty individuation and personal remoteness yield to a harmonious elision of being. It suggests the possibility of an afterlife and the infinite continuation of secular love.
The idea of connection is of course central to the Modernist Movement. EMForster’s famous cry: ‘Only connect!’ underlines the signficance of the very threads of intimacy, and what fluid threads they might be!
‘When she thought of herself and Charles throwing ducks and drakes on the beach, it seemed to depend somehow upon Mrs Ramsay sitting under the rock, with a pad on her knee, writing letters…’
Nothing is only itself in memory. Memory offers us the gift of connection through retrospect. And I find the unfinished, tentative process of this passage from To The lighthouse appealing and ‘right’ somehow as it reflects back upon the cutting up scene with James Ramsay and his mother in the opening scene of the novel.
Lives are made up of fragments that shape and reshape themselves around each other, and it is the ‘wave’ of Woolf’s mind that manages to capture this process through the rhythm of her narrative. Spatial concerns are mirrored in linguistic ones.
The concern over the Juxtapostion of visual details is mirrored in the ways in which one word needs to go next to another to produce an affect of memory work . We can thus reaccess the past through the act of narrative as reanimation. What may once have seemed to be commonplace and ordinary takes on an extraordinary status as a ‘gift’ of tenderness and even immortality, as the past becomes resurrected and thus reaffirming of enduring love:
Mrs Ramsay- it was part of her perfect goodness to Lily – sat there quite simply in the chair, flicked her needles to and fro, knitted her reddish-brown stocking, cast her shadow on the step. There she sat.
