O.W. Pollmann

Canadian Patient: visit with an ailing text

Ondaatje's The English Patient (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1992) has received a great deal of attention, some important prizes, and enthusiastic reviews. This is apuzzling business because thebookonlyjust knocks on the door of good enough literature. It is as pock-marked as JOrgen Prochnow with flaws, scenic and temporal inconsistencies, uncomfortable grammatical knots, curious word usage, plot problems, improbabilities, and impossibilities. To the extent that facts of any sort from outside of the story may be adduced, there is an error in the categorization of German bombs and-probably a Canadian first-the inter-textual inconsistency of Hana's age: if we credit In the Skin of the Lion she should be older than twenty-one in 1945 in the Patient since her real father dies in the winter of 192 1. Frederick Forsyth, in an article for the Toronto Star, Sunday, April 6, 1997 [F5], comments on the flaws that rattle around in the film version of The English Patient. Unfortunately several of those flaws were inherited from the book. Among these would certainly be plot contrivances, the practically impossible survival of the copy of The Histories by Herodotus through the crash and fire of the plane, the unbelievable presence of Almdsy in a field hospital near Florence, and therefore also the curious gathering of four characters at the Villa San Girolamo toward the end of the second World War. The Patient is in this sense like a Chamber music performance with some very persuasive passages that is spoiled by loud coughing throughout. And that is the case before such emergent issues as character construction or the ethos of the work have even been considered.

The Patient introduces a Jungian quatemity of figures not only in search of character and plot, but once assembled, also in search of lives that have unraveled during the exercise of war and fate. The artfully bombed villa to which they are attached works as both castle and garden, retains resonances of its function as nunnery, as hospital, as fortress, and as a renaissance playground where the representation of the spiritual is a pretext for the rediscovery of the human body, of the divine and the creaturely. The villa is also a shifting symbol for either civilization or anarchy, sneaks us into the storied spaces of Boccaccio's suburban Florentine villa in the Decameron or Poe's castle in The Masque of the Red Death, and, as all gardens do, figures as the garden of Eden. It is therefore also connected with the temptation of Adam and original sin. It is city and country, illusion and reality, light and darkness, history and the end of history. It is a maze that speaks of lost ways, of penitent steps, of knowledge destroyed and recovered, which keeps in its heart either Christ or Anti-Christ or perhaps only a battered minotaur. From there the labyrinthine text moves backwards and forwards in a potentially synchronic world "where everything is known already" except the identity of the burned man. The villa is the id (hidden bombs, soggy furniture), the ego (nature organized to be habitable), and the superego (architecture, the chapel); it represents reason, wi 1, an desire. It is a womb (and therefore tethered to the Cave of Swimmers) in general and Hana's ravaged womb in particular. It is thereby also associated with birth, life, death, and afterlife. The symbolic and connective potential of the villa, here by no means exhausted, is characteristic of a text that constantly draws the reader towards a luster of significance that blinds to the local event. The novel is, for its approximately three hundred largefonted pages a repository of pupal images and symbolic traces that rivals Cirlot's Dictionary of Symbols. However, this universalizing drift of signification more than anything recollects medieval allegories whose function is to provide a taxonomy of the chain of being by which the particular-to which such allegories are essentially indifferent-escapes into the architecture of God, or, in the case of the Patient, perhaps the archetypes of Jung.

Ondaatje's text slips back and forth between what Northrop Frye differentiated as novel and prose romance, between prose poetry and prose, and is additionally informed by short-story structures in at least the matters of Hanaand Kip. In fact, acareful reading-like biblical exegesis-suggests that different time frames were originally in place for two separate stories, which were concatenated for the book and a remarkable time discrepancy overlooked that has Hana in 1945 [641 at the same time that Kip the Good hears that Glen Miller has just died in December of 1944[76]. Confusion regarding time also surrounds the relationship of Katharine and Almásy. The text offers evidence for at least two time frames that involve either a shorter or a longer relationship and neither can absolutely be demonstrated or discounted. And no matter toward which scenario we tend there are unresolved comments or circumstances that lead to a disquieting indeterminacy that cannot be swept under the already bulging carpet of Heisenberg. If the short affair (less than 6 months in 1936) is to prevail then a great deal of time is lost on the author's desk or in Almdsy's drugged brain. If the long affair (about 2 years, 1937-38) prevails then the reader would have reason to doubt Katharine's conviction that she cannot live with a lie. And if the reader, who is only minimally privy to the deliberations and negotiations of the characters during this time, wants to co-operate with the text, these two time frames have to be held dialectically suspended and the apparent elision of one year has to be accepted.

Adifferent kink of composition is evident in Ondaatje's character construction. Hana the nurse cares for Almdsy the faux-English Patient, we might have guessed, because she is doing penance, caring for one life because she has aborted another. We might have thought that Hana has found a bit of peace in the unhurried routine of looking after the burned man, a kind of Zen of nursing, or that she is exercising a simple Christian caring at the tail end of a horrid war experience. We could not be faulted for suspecting that her presence with the bumed man was a healing involvement with an (ironically?) non-predatory male that would lead to a renewed openness to involvement with a coeval after her fiancee has died and she has been propositioned by soldiers, or that she cares for Almdsy as a substitute for her lost child, and so forth. All of these are possibilities: in fact, the psycho-dynamics of a person could absorb, and alter in relation to the interaction of all these factors together and variously. However, before she chooses to settle with her patient at the villa she has received a letter notifying her of her father's death [41]. There is no reference to further news about this death throughout the body of the book. Occasionally she wonders what his dying was like [90]. Then, and only in the last pages of the book, Ondaatje reveals Hana's master motive in a short-story effect with which we are 'splashed' in a letter [296] she writes to her step-mother Clara. It is now disclosed that her father/step-father Patrick has died a horrible death as a bum victim, a fact that radically re-aligns our moral and practical assessment of the Hana story. If a poem is the blush of true love (even if only of yourself), and a short story is an affair, then a novel is a marriage, and the author and the reader should move along in full confidence with each other. You probably shoudn't discover that your wife of long standing one morning suddenly has two heads about one of which youhaveboth been indenial. Practically,this rabbit-out-of-the-hat revelation poses some difficulties for the structuring of the novel and Hana's character. If Hana was fully aware of her father's death throughout then earlier remarks by the narrator or Hana are deceptive if not disingenuous. It would requir& an angry, ironic reading of Hana's earlier questions that is not textually warranted. And stepping away from the text, it appears as if Ondaatje was simply not forthright, preferring to finesse later with a trump card he had up his sleeve: he deliberately occulted the character for the final effect. As it stands, our understanding of her care of the burned man is suddenly illuminated as if by the flash of the atomic bombs and the reader cannot rid himself of the suspicion that Hana's character has become discontinuous, has been 'painted' and then 'painted over', that in the process the troth between text and reader has been broken.

Is there a whiff of postmodernity in all this confusion, as some reviewers have maintained? Frankly, one can hear Professor Frye's ghost sheepishly intoning at the black board of a classroom in the old Academic Building at Victoria College, with lips judiciously pursed, the phrase Colonial Postmodern, a pitchforked notion which would then find its place alongside his equally ironic Bush Garden. And the postmortem edict that language is always and everywhere marked by the symptoms of unconscious desire (Lacan) primarily addresses not the constructs and operations within the text but the sociological constructs of author and/or reader and their operations. The work is, after all, something the author more or less carefully composes or deposits by way of words, a verbal pattern that the reader brings to life. As the applied mind is ever a hunter of forms, of patterns and relationships, it is usually the nature and want of the reading sensibility, once a kind of contract has been established, to help the author along unless it encounters resistance. This can happen when it stumbles over grammatical irregularities or language errata such as stones that "smell like moth [90]" and a moon that is "on" a person "like skin, a sheaf of water [31]". Or it can happen when the implied author, like an uncle pleased with a story that he has told before, reiterates that people resemble the dead knight of Ravenna [96, 135, and obliquely, 170] or have metaphorical wings all over the place [10, 48, 72, 103, 128, 301]. Or when a formulaic assertion suggestive of a centered subject (I am/He/She was a person/man/ woman/who/whose) appears at least twenty-one times in the text or when faces can be "an arrow [37], "like a spear [77]:", and "like a lean dark gun [10]". Or when a rhetorical device or figurative turn is used isodiscursively by both the narrator and his characters, as when Almdsy wonders: "How did she hold this story about me [239]"; and the narrator later observes with a modesty that requires disciples: "She is a woman I don't know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings [301]". Then again, Hana (or the narrator) muses that "the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locust had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night [7]", and Almdsy later rambles about "...bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves [261]". The point of the last example is not that it is grammatical nonsense but that the mannerism of heaped similes was earlier found in the discourse of the narrator. A further point is that such moments in the text force upon the reader an awareness of the 'pretext', the writing oilaboured making of the thing, and finally the presence of the composing intelligence and its needs and limitations. And the last simile in Almásy's rambling is, afterall, a simple monstrosity, during which an impossible figure of speech stumbles over bad grammar. But, you will say, giving the author the benefit of the doubt because he can't possibly mean this to be taken seriously, surely this is the result of Almásy's morphine-soaked brain: the bum victim is confused, after all, possibly delusional at this point. Why should what he says make sense? And we find ourselves tempted to ask a de-constructive question: then why are punctuation and spelling correct?

One of the weaker segments in the Patient is the Second Story Picture Rescue. Caravaggio, a thief and spy at this point, attempts to steal back an undeveloped picture taken of him at a Nazi function under the curious premise that the Germans will, once it's developed, identify a person (Caravaggio) who isn't supposed to be at a party where he was seen by all and sundry. In other words he takes the risk of walking about a German-occupied building, being seen by guards, the risk of getting caught (and presumably killed), in order to keep from being identified by the Germans? That aside, he engages upon this adventure on what seems initially to be a moonlit night, where he "runs" across a path as "his shadow curled under him, painted by the moon [36]", so that the figure, to judge by the static ("curl is such a slow word, you can't rush it [103]") nature of the images, is suddenly fixed as in a cartoon frame or a filmic storyboard. The Villa Cosima's windows are described as "square moons [36]" so that it would seem that there is ample light. Shortly afterwards, when Caravaggio sneaks unobserved into a room where two people are having sex, there is "not even a grain of light [39]". No light squeezing under the crack between door and floor, presumably not a hint of artificial lighttorches, gaslight, electrical light?-from the outside of a villa that has guards inside and cars coming and going, no light from a discontinuous moon! And there do not seem to be any curtains because when a car passes or turns outside, the light beams from the headlights sweep through the room, passing over the naked Caravaggio. Ondaatje insists on unnecessarily and inappropriately describing the fairly common experience of car lights startling a room: the light was "like something sprayed out of a hose [36]". The female photographer, who is apparently making love with a German general in utter darkness, then sees the thief and her face is "an arrow upon him" even though the reader has already gotten the point. And how did Caravaggio find the room with the woman, the camera, and the general? He is on a third floor, passes a room that is being guarded, lets himself into the next room, steps out on the verandah, lets himself down to the verandah below, and "only now can he enter the room of Anna and her general [38]"? And how would he know that the camera will be with her in that room?

Ondaatje's language routinely breaks the integrity of the text to demonstrate ingenuity. It offers aphoristic comments about the business of writing, is often mannered, awkward in its struggle for lyrical resonance, and frequently stops the imagination in its tracks as the power, meaning, or appropriateness of an image is considered. Longinus observes that the best figure of speech is one that goes unnoticed. Ondaatje, however, indulges an image the way that some owners do their forward dogs. So, for example, a gray sheet that covered a piano is dragged along by Hana like "a winding cloth, a net of fish[62]". Perhaps 'winding sheet' might have been a happier phrase because it could have been connected with 'sheet music', but through this metaphor Ondaatje identifies the obvious, namely that this gray sheet has enshrouded the piano. Still a problem, but fine. 'Net of fish' is more problematic. Yes, perhaps a trace of Christ is present as a 'fisher of men', perhaps the blush of a fairy tale motif edges in (fisher king) to be picked up later between Kip and Hana. Then again, the image could be emerging from the 'madness' of Hana, a supposition that requires difficult decisions about narrative strategies. But in the end this image simply does not work: it ruptures the magic reality that has been established.

In another example Almdsy seems to Hana "a burned animal, taut and dark, a pool for her [41]." The 'burned animal' image might evoke the notion of sacrifice, and the pool could be the mirror of Narcissus or a prefiguration of the brown river of which Kip's skin colour later reminds a Hana who at this time must already know that her father has died a horrid death-although this is occulted-as a bum victim. And 'burned animal' is certainly a powerful but ambiguous figure that is just as likely to cause repulsion as pity since it dehumanizes the state of Almdsy (and her father?). Similarly 'pool' presents itself as a metaphoric place in which Hana might hide (hiding in a pool?), but is equally associated with danger: in a country of waters you must not dive into such 'dark' pools. And how would a burned animal be a dark pool? Logic here struggles to digest an impalatable metaphor (the raw and the cooked?): of course this is ultimately a matter of taste and sensibility. Such figures of speech are presumably meant to translate feelings and should sound those feelings in the reader. Instead they insinuate themselves as an imposition and/or the presence of Ondaatje the poet, showing off an inventiveness that is not inevitably apt. This is particularly evident in the next moment when Hana lights a candle, whereupon "light lifts itself onto her shoulder", and as she breathes in the sulphur signature of the spent match, she "imagines she also breathes in the light" [14]. The first of these metaphors (the unbearable heaviness of being light?) is a laboured and conflicted image that fosters a forensic speculation about how Hana is positioned so that her shoulders are illuminated rather than in the shadow of the candle's light, and struggles within its own tension, in the sense that light is, if nothing else, light. The second metaphor (breathing light) makes the reader wonder about the imagination of Hana. The question is initially whether anyone has ever imagined inhaling the light of a candle, and what the implications are for the sensibilities of a character who does imagine such a thing. In this instance, then, the image hooks you like weeds under water and impedes your flow through the story. To play with Gottfried Benn's definition of poetry, our author elevates things into the language of the incomprehensible, over and over again.

But perhaps the most arresting if not gripping example of such knots in the grain of the text occurs when the quixotic and pathologically obsessed Almsdy, after Katharine has left him, wonders "did she climb down into the well we helped dig together and hold herself, the way I desired myself toward her with my hand? [239]". While there are other marginal explanations of this, none is as convincing as that Almdsy is masturbating while he is imagining Katharine, and apparently wondering whether she might be doing the same thing. And he appears to share this memory and reflection with Caravaggio, probably under the influence of the combination of morphine and alcohol, which the latter applies in order to encourage a confession. The reasonably intelligent reader of a novel that takes place a little over fifty years ago, probably has at least a hazy sense that people might have behaved, spoken, and perhaps even thought differently than they do today. Ondaatje's characters and conversations do not convey a sense of the time in which they are set. The author in any case does not handle conversations very well-they frequently feel stiff and unreal-and seems deliberately to avoid the gravity of history, which would force him to pay attention to what people wore, how people talked, how people viewed the world in 1945, and how they couldn't because of the times. There are conversational moments that ring false because they imply psychological epistemes that feel latter-day rather than W.W.II. In the real world it would certainly have been possible for Almásy to discuss his masturbatory habits. However, the notion at least raises an eyebrow. And onanism is not an element of romance convention. On the contrary, it is connected with the creaturely if not bestial aspects of the species and was until recently viewed as pathology. We might expect such behaviour from Caliban but not from Count Ladislaus de Almdsy. Then again, he is one of those European foreigners we read about in Henry James. This moment in the Patient struggles to transform the creaturely act-see also the dance of Onan into a lyrical gesture of devotion, possibly the elusive sublime. Ondaatje must be given credit for taking a risk (see also his 'white character' from In the Skin of a Lion) but he does not succeed. If this moment were transposed to the screen, you would expect a slow act by a male bathed in the hazy yellows and browns of memory, accompanied by the andante movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto #21 (Elvira Madigan). When you liberate the scene in this manner its ridiculous nature becomes immediately apparent: the image is already parodied by itself. And if that is the case, of what is the author here attempting to persuade?

Regardless of Habermas' notion that the language of a literary text is world-disclosing, there is no world based on the text outside of the text: the text centers and contains its reality like a singularity. That we are concerned with textuality, a 'readable' artifice and a story-telling convention is already evident in the immediate contrivance of the puzzle of the burned man, and the fact that the text, in order to maintain that mystery spring, has to keep calling Almásy "the burned man", the "Englishman", etc., until his identity is revealed. Though, if the text is trusted, this is established halfway through and Almásy presumably knows who he is after his Bedouin experience[6]. In this sense the story is a deliberate occultation that can't be read a second time without an awareness of the text's broad manipulation. And if the burned man isn't turned in bed to prevent bed sores, if we don't know how he voids, what his excreta smell like, it isn't because Ondaatje chooses not to show us something that must occur if a patina of reality is to be bestowed. Rather, it doesn't occur and it apparently doesn't need to because this isn't an aspect of the author's agenda. The burned man ironically isn't about his basic physical needs as a patient, he isn't about most of his past, and he is largely not about his current intra-psychic experiences or his mimetic self during the relationship, just as a Greek statue is not about its organs. Nevertheless, the burned man is presumably produced as a more or less credible human experience in the play between reader and text. If there is, in the end, a failure to communicate a character, if the figure is merely a more or less poetic convenience-as in a poetic Ockham's Razor-that affords the desired effects with the least information, it will be because he i s first and foremost an artifice of soap opera romance. Denis de Rougemont, in Love in the Western World (1974), reviews the "tacit convention" and "intimate dialogue" between reader and text in such romances. He argues that

 "what shall be verisimilitude in any
 given piece of literary fiction depends
 on the nature of the passions which 
 this piece of fiction is intended to
 please.  In short, the reader pays no
 heed to distortions or to twistings of
 the 'logic' of current observation so
 long as the license thus taken produces
 the pretexts necessary to the passions
 which he longs to feel.  Hence it is in
 the kink of 'tricks of tfie trade'
 employed by the author that the real
 plot of a given piece of fiction is
 disclosed, and a reader condones these
 tricks precisely to the extent that he
 shares the author's intentions 
 (Rougemont, 36)."

Presumably the tribe that thrills to the fetish of fatal love will forgive a curdled text and probably welcomes the Improbable as a positive indication of the genre's workings. In that convention nature and the social order, logic and desire are in any case always at odds. Our author-whose textual echo reminds us of Anna Karenina-would here be dipping in a tradition that includes the most celebrated lovers in our literary canon and it might be argued that this is his at bat with this tradition. Rougemont reminds us that "[w]hat stirs lyric poets is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. And passion means suffering. There we have the fundamental fact (Rougemont, 36)." Of course Ondaatje retreats from a full commitment to this passion when he establishes the politically correct domestic bliss of Kirpal Singh as the moral touchstone of the book, shows us an Almásy who masturbates, ingests menstrual blood, and visits the seedy quarters of Cairo before and afterhis illicit affair. Still, if the language of passion has received an interesting modulation in such Anne Rice works as Interview with a Vampire, Ondaatje aligns his story with these darker tones when Almásy enthuses about the depth of his relationship with Katharine in the context of tasting her menstrual blood or desiring necrophilic, introjective contact. Some, but- not all of these moments might be considered elements of the romantic tradition, a tradition that can frequently be neglectful of the shape of the individual caught in its workings because the desire-read libido of (the composer and) the readerreadily fills in any outline and in fact resists an excess of description. This may also explain why the characters of Katharine and Almásy are to a large extent mimetically unrealized and indeterminate. But it doesn't explain why their difficulties-she wants commitment, he doesn't; she wants him to share his feelings, he doesn'tsound modern, sound as if they have been lifted from Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars.

Archetypical criticism (mostly Frye, a little Jung) would see in the figure of Almásy the sacrificial "burned animal", a potential feast for the gods or the God of the old testament, and an allusion to The Lamb. If we accept this then an allegorical subtext to the Patient emerges, which collects trace symbols in the text like the 'sacrament' of the menstrual ingestion, or the Christ-comparisons, in which the Almásy figure is itself sacrificed as man and beast (phamarkos) to atone for the hormonal sins of the world. The burned man is-among many other things-in turn a decadent Western civilization and an individual adulterer. He is also the familiarof fire, a burning prepuce (flaming leather helmet on naked almásy [5]), the skillful and cunning Odysseus, the hubris of reason, and so forth. In keeping with an anti-colonial theme, the eastern Singh is connected with the control of fire and passion while the western Almásy is linked with their destructive potential. And how far afield would we be if we momentarily abandoned a broadly post-Freudian perspective for an older religious discourse (Augustine, among others) in identifying Almásy's character flaws as the vices of camal pleasure, pride, and curiosity. The year is 1945 and auto-immune deficiency disease is not yet among us to finger lifestyles that have walked off the map. There are other choices, of course, but the lingeringdeath of abody symbolically bumedby its own passion recommends itself as an adequately disquieting substitute. In this sense the Patient is a cautionary, harshly moral tale (Leviticus 20:10) that ironically indicts desire-upon which the making of a text is first and foremost premisedto such a degree that it is flat-out promotional material for the long-standing Catholic notion that sex should only occur in marriage and only for procreation. While Kip attains to a happy 'afterlife' with a "laughing wife" largely only by the kind of luck which is a clear textual reward (he is punished for idolatry and false consciousness with a bout of nuclear psychosis) for his nature, Almásy is soundly beaten about by the same textual 'fate'. Nor is this a smooth integration of character and event that persuades of the fitness of the outcome on one, and the justice of it on the other hand. To some extent, in fact, it is precisely the postmortem ambiguity of the text with regard to such issues as 'choice' that questions the old testament turn of the text's moral pre-occupations. And while we really don't know enough or care enough about the burned man to pity him or feel awe at the precision of the punishment, we are persuaded that the plot which takes Almdsy into the cave and then bums him, shows enough muscle strain on the part of the author that we are not convinced of its truth.

The text espouses a deeply troubling medieval ethos that punishes with a mathematical rigou'r and biblical ferocity. And it is here where any pretension to the postmortem stops and the text deteriorates into a homily for civi I order and ego psychology in the manner of a made-for-TV movie. It is surely no coincidence that Clifton the 'murderer' dies or that Katharine, as a female, married adulteress receives what is arguably the severest punishment. Through the application of a kind of complicity calculus, it could further be argued, Caravaggio the kindly and eccentric thief only has his thumbs cut off while Hana, who has aborted a child, thereafter discovers-the sin of the daughter visited upon the father-that her father has been killed, never really gets on track again, and does penance through her war nursing and her caring for the burned man: although the amounts of penance for abortion will vary in Catholic penitentials, a span of three and a half years is proscribed in the Irish Canons (ca. 675) and the Old Irish Penitential (ca. 800). The question of a penance period for adultery (cum uxore alteriu's) is more complicated. There is early a question whether such deadly sins as idolatry (worship of the desert?) or fornication were remissible at all, and the ambivalent text-with the death of Katharine and the announced but off-stage death of Almásy-certainly argues for such an unforgiving, essentially Catholic position. Where remission through penance is granted, the punishment periods vary according to the details of the deed and the position of the perpetrators among other critcria. Thus there may be an assignment of a three year period of penance (1942-1945: burn victim) or elsewhere a seven year period (1938?-1945: victim of pathological grief) for someone who has committed adultery with the wife or the betrothed of another. The righteous world of this tale, the punishment that is inflicted by the text on those who walk off the map and succumb to their natures also remembers Dante's Divine Comedy where a special place is set aside, in the Seventh Cornice of purgatory, for the lustful. There souls are "purged and set in order" in a cleansing fire. While it is not clear that Almásy is finally "purged and set in order" or whether his penance has been successful, we leave him quiet after he has sung his song, trailing away in the dwindling candle light. We will also remember that his personal suffering has already been fixed and minimized by reference to the apocalyptic horror-which his burned body adumbrates-caused by Little Boy and Fat Man. And through this broad turn, the opportune satanus ex machina that dislodges Kip from Hana and initiates his nuclear psychosis and thereafter arguably the weakest part of the text, Ondaatje ends his tale with a whimper, a bang, and a last supper with the saintly sapper.

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