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Reading Objects in Michael Ondaatje's the English Patient Books vs. Bombs: Reading Objects in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient Katharine Schwab An Honors Thesis in English Literature Stanford University May 15, 2015 Advisor Professor Saikat Majumdar Second Reader Dr. Alice Staveley Table of Contents Introduction: Toward a Theory of Things…………………………………………………………...…1 Chapter One: Books……………………………………………………………………………………………10 Embodied Reading: Recuperating Subjectivity Through Books The Fragmented Book: Historical Reconstruction and Contradiction Losing Faith: The Book and the Violence of Colonialism Chapter Two: Bombs………………………………………………………………………………………….28 English Fathers: War and the Western Weapon Intimate Defusing: The Psycho-Sensuality of the Bomb Ideological Epiphany: The Bomb as Colonizer Conclusion: Toward a Relational Identity……………………………………………..……………..46 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………………….…………48 Acknowledgements It has been a year and a half since I first read The English Patient, which stunned me with its depth and reaffirmed my deep belief in the power of language to move us. Thank you to Andrew Lanham, who first put this book in my hands and helped me realize how much I could excavate from it. Thank you to Saikat Majumdar, who changed the way I think over the past year. Thank you to the effervescent Alice Staveley, who supported me throughout this process with gleeful passion and the utmost grace. Thank you to Elizabeth Wilder, whose insightful edits and encouragements have made this thesis possible. Thank you to the professors and mentors I’ve collected over the past four years, who challenged me deeply, dared me to explore my mind, and helped me imagine what my world can be. Thank you to my fellow thesis warriors, for maintaining a sense of humor—always. Thank you to my friends for their understanding and support. Thank you to my family for their unending love and thoughtful conversation, and to my mother especially, for instilling in me a love of books and for her willingness to edit my essays from the very beginning. Last of all, thank you to Mathew Kuruvinakunnel, who was my Kip. Schwab 1 Introduction: Toward a Theory of Things “These days, history can unabashedly begin with things and with the senses by which we apprehend them.” -- Bill Brown, “Thing Theory” In a description halfway through his 1992 novel The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje puts books and bombs in the same room. “Bombs were attached to taps, to the spines of books, they were drilled into fruit trees,” Ondaatje writes (80). It’s a loaded image: two vastly different objects that normally reside in different contexts and have different connotations appear side by side in his prose. By forcing books and bombs together, Ondaatje begs his reader to ask: Why put such opposing objects in the same space? How do these two objects activate each other? And finally, how do these objects structure the identities of Ondaatje’s damaged characters? In this thesis, I will address these questions of objects and identity. As theorist Bill Brown proclaims in his seminal 2001 treatise “Thing Theory,” history can be re-evaluated by using the material world—and embodied experience—as the lens for critical inquiry. Rather than continuing the humanities’ continual probing of subjective experience though abstract, textual analysis, Brown advocates for a framework that uses objects to interrogate the boundary between objective and subjective, sensuality and mentality, matter and mind. He complicates the separation between the subject-object binary by explaining that the world is full of ‘quasi-objects’ and ‘quasi-subjects.’1 Brown quotes French philosopher and 1 Brown borrows this argument from Bruno Latour, who uses Michel Serres’ terms ‘quasi-objects’ and ‘quasi-subjects.’ Schwab 2 anthropologist Bruno Latour, who writes, “things do not exist without being full of people” (quoted in Brown, 12). Objects, man-made and otherwise, take on an agency of their own when they interact with people because they structure physical, cultural, and emotional spaces. We are more intimate with our objects than we are with most people – our beds cradle us at night, our cars extend our legs, and our computers hold our deepest secrets. If Brown reads history through the lens of thing theory, then with this thesis I propose literature can be analyzed similarly. These days, literature, too, can unabashedly begin with things. This proposition poses an immediate problem. Reading as a practice is embodied in physical space, but resides primarily within the mind. The only object a reader can encounter within literature is the book (or e-reader) that they hold in their hands. However, Brown’s directive points me to think about the space that objects within narrative occupy, despite their status of being once removed from the reader’s embodied experience. While we may not experience a narrative sensually, the characters within that narrative do. In The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje imbues the objects he writes about with physicality and emotionality attuned to the sensual experience of his characters. Reading objects as texts within The English Patient shows how the lens of thing theory can shed valuable and necessary light on the subjective realities of characters in a fictional setting, just as Brown establishes objects as a frame through which to view history. The English Patient follows Hana, a Canadian World War II nurse who cares for a mysteriously burned man in a ruined Italian villa. Kirpal Singh or Kip, a Sikh sapper with British allegiances and Caravaggio, a Canadian thief whose thumbs Schwab 3 were cut off by the Germans, join them in the villa. As flashbacks slowly reveal the patient’s past, Hana rehabilitates her traumatized identity and Kip defuses bombs. I argue that the villa, under its ruinous trappings, is the stage for a dance between sensual, ideological objects and Ondaatje’s characters. In this thesis, I will focus on books and bombs, which are both present as key motifs throughout the novel. Douglas Mao’s book Solid Objects provides a foundation in literary theory for this type of analysis. Mao writes: This feeling of regard for the physical object as object – as not- self, as not-subject, as most helpless and will-less of entities, but also as fragment of Being, as solidity, as otherness in its most resilient opacity – seems a peculiarly twentieth-century malady or revelation. (4) His conception of literature’s fascination with objects, especially in the twentieth century, highlights objects as charged with meaning, both in their commodity status within postindustrial capitalism as well as illuminators of subjective experience. He also conceives of the object as autonomous, having its own existence and in turn its own agency in the context of constructing cultural systems and of shaping identity. Mao calls the object “extrasubjective,” but emphasizes that while the subject dominates the object in discourse, there is a dialectical relationship between the two entities (10). Using art to rethink and challenge this relationship isn’t new: “As poets and pictorial artists have always known, the thing is the greatest mystery, and the source of all other mysteries” (van Binsbergen 32). Mao’s understanding of the object as both commodity and emblem and therefore a potent force in both societal trends and personal development echoes anthropological studies of objects. In the discipline commonly called material Schwab 4 studies, anthropologists study objects and material culture from various societies in order to glean insights into social practices and commonly held values, an approach that informs my study of the object in literature. Scholar Victor Turner modifies Mao’s theory of objects as commodity-emblems by theorizing two distinct “poles” by which an object can be evaluated: the ideological and the sensory. Anthropologist Nicole Boivin explains that Turner’s conception of the ideological pole refers to how an object operates on a societal level and reflects norms and moral codes. Contrarily, the “natural and physiological phenomena and processes” of an object occupy the sensory pole (Boivin 39). I use these two poles to structure my analysis of books and bombs in The English Patient, where Ondaatje’s representation of objects intertwines both anthropological modes of being. However, Boivin hesitates to place too great an emphasis on objects as the vehicles for ideas without paying equal due to their physicality. She offers phenomenology as a “corrective to the often overwhelming focus on abstract symbolic systems, language, and representation” (92). By focusing on the processes of perception, phenomenologists provide a useful theoretical frame to counter the tendency for scholars to focus on object’s representational qualities. In this thesis, I am careful to attend to both aspects of the object, and will show how the object is both sensual and ideological, existing within a network of meaning that includes physical and psychological space. French theorist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception is key to understanding the relationship between bodies, things, and the minds that interpret them. Rather than establishing “poles” of interpretation like Mao, Turner, Schwab 5 and Boivin, Merleau-Ponty attempts to erase the distinction between minds and matter: The thing is inseparable from a person perceiving it, and can never be actually in itself because its articulations are those of our very existence, and because it stands at the other end of our gaze or at the terminus of a sensory exploration which invests it with humanity. To this extent, every perception is a communication or a communion, the taking up or completion by us of some extraneous intention or, on the other hand, the complete expression outside ourselves of our perceptual powers and coition, so to speak, of our body with things. (373, his emphasis) Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception advocates for a merging between body and thing because objects only exist to us through our sensory perceptions of them. By emphasizing the body’s key role in perception, he claims, “the body [is] the only way of being conscious of the world, that subject and object [are] one” (Boivin 66).
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