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). His theory of phenomenology establishes key philosophical backing for my investigation into the relationship between things, senses, and characters’ identities in The English Patient.
While Merleau-Ponty’s perspective provides valuable insight into the
“communion” between subject and object through the senses, an anthropological study by Janet Hoskins puts the thing’s significance in context with personal identity. Hoskins finds that some objects in Eastern Indonesia serve as vessels for “a collective representation of the past” and others are “biographical objects that become entangled in people’s lives, and in the process become vehicles of selfhood”
(Boivin 116). Her study provides real world precedent for my assertion that objects in The English Patient function as spaces for characters’ negotiation of identity. Schwab 6
According to Hoskins, the object takes on an emotional significance as well, becoming a highly personal collage of sensory information, memory, and identity.
Daniel Miller writes, “the whole system of things, with their internal order, make us the people we are” (53). I argue that these theories of subject-object relations function similarly in literature, where a writer can use objects as a short cut to establishing a character’s identity.
Books and bombs, while different, contain certain key similarities. Both are tied to Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment ideologies that enabled Western civilization to dominate the rest of the world economically, militarily, and culturally in the 20th century—particularly in Britain. With weapons in one hand and books in the other, the British conquered a vast colonial empire throughout the Americas,
Africa, Asia and Australia, and then colonized it with written and spoken language.
Western philosophers praised the merits of individual subjectivity and rationality over communal living and emotionality, and Western statesmen reinforced their ideas with weapons developed under the pressure of progress. Theorist Ngugi wa
Thiong’o writes about the combined approach of violence and ideology in his book
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. He describes this kind of colonialism as a combination of “the physical violence of the battlefield… followed by the psychological violence of the classroom. But where the former was visibly brutal, the latter was visibly gentle” (9). Ngugi’s reference to the classroom as a site of psychological trauma for colonized peoples echoes his assertion that
“language was the means of the spiritual subjugation” (9). Books and bombs, while apparently different, both work in favor of the colonialist. The characters and their Schwab 7 objects are located within the network of global power, which informs my definition of ideology. More than simply a society’s value system, ideology encompasses the means through which a person understands and interacts with herself, her society, and the world at large. Implicit in this definition of ideology is the fact that ideology must always be contextualized within global power hierarchies, and that similarly, each individual’s pursuit of self-understanding and identity operates within the same structures.2
Most scholarship of The English Patient focuses on the novel’s engagement with colonial history, geography, and the body as a space for negotiating hybrid identities, and sometimes attempts to situate the characters within ideological spheres of influence. Christopher McVey argues that the body is “a conduit into the past and the means through which that past might be reclaimed,” an argument that echoes across much Ondaatje criticism (141). Critics like Stephanie M. Hilger attend to how the novel blurs national boundaries and places the individual’s recuperation of identity within the context of a broad historical narrative. In his book Michael
Ondaatje, Douglas Barber helps situate Ondaatje within literary history by describing him as a modernist poet with a symbolic bent, a postmodern novelist in the tradition of indeterminacy, and a postcolonial thinker who adds a dimension of
2 My definition of ideology is informed throughout this thesis by Louis Althusser’s essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Althusser defines ideology as “the system of the ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group” (84). Ideology is both “an imaginary assemblage” as well as a force driving “the concrete history of concrete material individuals materially producing their existence” (85). Althusser’s definition foregrounds the role of ideology in material culture, claiming that ideology manifests through social practices and rituals. The subject, “acting in all consciousness according to his belief” carries ideology in everyday life, thus reproducing the means of production. (93). Schwab 8 political and social action to his work in an attempt to give voice to historical marginality (6). Objects do play a role in some criticism of The English Patient, but remain peripheral or figure into criticism about ownership in the novel. Significant among these is Jon Saklofske, whose article, “The Motif of the Collector and
Implications of Historical Appropriation in Ondaatje’s Novels,” reflects on objects by treating the patient and Hana as collectors, and Ondaatje as a “writer-collector” who recycles history through creative intervention (76). Also notable is critic Elizabeth
Kella, who writes that the novel “sets forth a critique of human essence that brings into focus the material forces which shape allegiances and create or destroy communities” (84). Her argument, focused on the connection between community and identity, astutely notes the force of materiality in The English Patient as well as objects’ relevance in the formation of self. However, Kella claims that the characters create a community at the villa that is “stripped of the claptrap of national ideologies,” which “allows them to achieve a new, purer form of identity” that she calls “essential selves” (92). She contradicts herself by acknowledging the vitality of objects at the villa—which I will show are ideologically charged—while claiming that the villa is a clean slate for the characters to rebuild themselves after “crises in their cultural identities” (92). Situating my analysis within a thing theory framework, I argue that Ondaatje treats books and bombs as both sensual and ideologically positioned objects that are instrumental in identity formation and reconstruction.
In my first chapter, I focus on the book, beginning with its ideological positioning as a carrier of Western conceptions of selfhood. I explore three central Schwab 9 characters’ relationships with books, highlighting how their Western or non-
Western identities both inform and complicate their interactions with the book- object. For Canadian nurse Hana, the book is a space for recuperation and self- building after trauma; for the patient, a cartographer who loves the desert but whose allegiances are fundamentally colonial, the book is a space to re-write history; for Sikh sapper Kip, the book is an untrustworthy vessel of violence. In his treatment of the book-object as a means to explore his characters’ identity, Ondaatje supports many of the key philosophers and anthropologists I have outlined above, imbuing the book-object with agency and ideology.
In my second chapter, I will focus my analysis on bombs, which occupy a similar space to the book in terms of their symbolic importance and recurrence as a motif. This chapter begins with analysis of weapons technology within Western history and then moves to Ondaatje’s portrayal of weapons—both guns and bombs—and how he positions them in relation to cultures, bodies, and spaces. The rest of the chapter investigates the connection between the bomb and Kip’s complex postcolonial identity, while exploring the dynamic and ultimately incompatible relationship between Hana and Kip. When the atomic bombs explode in Japan, the extreme violence becomes an epiphanic moment for Kip, shocking him out of passive allegiance to the English and uncovering the bomb’s connection to colonial trauma.
Let us turn to books.
Schwab 10
Chapter One: Books
“A book, a map of knots, a fuze board, and a room of four people in an abandoned villa lit only with candlelight and now and then light from a storm...” - Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
As a material object, the book consists of a stack of paper, inked words, a cover, and a binding mechanism. But as John Milton wrote in 1644, “books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are” (quoted in Cummings, 93). While the material characteristics of a book dictate physical modes of the reader’s experience, the book has an abstraction at its core: “the words and the meanings collected within it”
(Cummings 93). Beyond the cover lies the imprint of a human mind, focused by intent and empowered by the agency of articulation. The presence of the implied author turns the object into a totem of human thought and voice, almost anthropomorphic in its significance. A book: paper, inked words, cover, binding, and humanity, wrapped up neatly into a single parcel. However, it is the relationship between the book and its reader that makes books the ultimate social object: while
“all objects are social agents” in a limited sense, the book explicitly acts as the material mediator between the reader and the author—and can act as a spiritual mediator as well (Dant 13). Scholar Andrew Piper argues for the centrality of St.
Augustine in the history of reading because reading was the conduit for Augustine’s personal conversion. Augustine, Piper writes, established the practice of reading— and the book itself—as “the foundation of Western humanistic learning for the next Schwab 11 fifteen hundred years” (3). It is an object that relies upon a subject to activate it, on a physical communion between living human mind and once living paper.
However, the book object is also fraught with tension. In its current form, the book depends on technologies of reproduction and the fundamental
Enlightenment concept of a single subjectivity manifested in the authorial voice. The book depends upon subjective authority of a privileged voice, a problematic undercurrent that runs throughout the history of Western modernity. The book is not only symbolic of authorial agency; in non-Western contexts it is also a repressive object that is exclusionary for some as much as it is inclusionary for others. Because the book is tied to fundamentally Western conceptions of humanity,
I argue that the book is a particularly ideological object. I will use the book object as the lens to explore the implications of this tension for characters in Ondaatje’s The
English Patient, where books are a primary motif and often provide the frame for rehabilitating and renegotiating identity.
In The English Patient, the ideological tension between East and West manifests in various characters’ relationships with books. Books, as vehicles of voice and subjectivity, are apt spaces for the negotiation of identity, if we define identity as the practice of allying oneself to particular ideological allegiances at the expense of others. Within The English Patient, characters understand their identity in the world by balancing memories of their homelands—which operate within a global hierarchy of power—with the traumatic experiences of love and war. I will focus on three characters: Hana, a traumatized Canadian nurse who abandons her post and takes refuge in a ruined Italian villa at the close of World War II; her patient, of Schwab 12 uncertain nationality who has suffered extensive burns after a plane crash; and
Kirpal Singh, colloquially known as Kip, a Sikh sapper who comes to stay in the villa while he clears the Italian countryside of active bombs. Each character has a different awareness of global power structures, which impacts how much they depend upon the book object as a vessel for identity and sense of self.
Critic Carrie Dawson argues that Hana, Caravaggio, and Kip recuperate the unsteady, disintegrated nature of their own identities by attempting to reconcile the
English patient’s fragmented narrative. If they understand the identity of this fragmented, burned man, they hope to recuperate an idealized vision of a whole, singular self. This process takes place through the body of the English patient— through a combination of morphine and other healing techniques, Hana, Caravaggio, and Kip attempt to untangle the patient’s history and recover a sense of unity within their own identities. Dawson, along with critics Christopher McVey and Stephanie M.
Hilger, place great importance on the body as the primary conduit for reclaiming and re-writing both history and identity. While the relationship between the body and identity is one of Ondaatje’s central metaphors, I propose that each character’s relationship to the physical world is even more fundamental to an understanding of the novel—a topic many critics glance over briefly but don’t thoroughly interrogate.
Because the book is one such essential motif that Ondaatje uses to explore the characters’ negotiation of their pasts and their present, I have chosen to use it as the lens through which I will dissect Hana, the patient, and Kip’s ideological placement within the novel’s world. Schwab 13
Trauma theory, phenomenology, cultural psychology, and thing theory all inform my analyses of these characters’ relationships with books. After the trauma of war, Hana loses a sense of agency and attempts to distance herself psychologically from her body and the world. She begins a healing process that entails using books as places to reassert her lost agency. The book is a recuperative object for the patient as well. He uses his copy of Herodotus’s The Histories to rewrite history and re-invent his position within Western narratives. However, the patient’s role as a cartographer begins to complicate the book-object’s position as a space of self- invention and agency because he knows the book is a tool in the perpetuation of colonial power. Kip’s inability to trust books because they contain the ideological justifications for colonial violence and war further reveals the book’s violent underbelly. Ondaatje’s use of the book as a motif throughout the novel shows that the book is an oppressive and ideological object, both a passive symbol and an active perpetrator of Western narratives, systems of power, and conceptions of the self that don’t necessarily align outside a Western context.
Embodied Reading: Recuperating Subjectivity Through Books
As a nurse in World War II, Hana’s nursing responsibilities necessitate that the dying men around her dictate the pace of her existence. She is “surrounded day and night by [soldiers’] wounds,” forced to place the needs of the dying above her own bodily needs (Ondaatje 51). Her attempts to feed unwilling and unable patients despite her own hunger are a “furious exhaustion,” the phrase filled with her latent anger and helplessness at her situation (53). After three full days without a moment Schwab 14 of rest, Hana curls up next to the mattresses of dead men. Her relationship to the dying is contractual and brief, and when her hair accidently touches the blood of a wound, she cuts it because “she would have nothing to link her, to lock her, to death”
(52). Ondaatje’s use of the word “lock” recalls the practice of women cutting locks of hair for their lovers to take into battle as good luck charms and signs of affection.
Hana’s rejection of this tradition—she cuts off her hair because it gets in the way— reinforces the harsh, utilitarian position she takes to nursing. Her refusal to look in mirrors, which are signifiers for self-identification and recognition, becomes emblematic of her subordination of self to work, of her mental health to the bodily needs of the dying.
Because she is unable to physically remove her body from interacting with the dying, Hana calls all her patients Buddy in order to create psychological distance between herself and the men. Through her loss of agency over her body, Hana becomes distant from herself, her mind hardening around “buried sentences” like “I will survive this. I won’t fall apart at this” (50). However, through this process Hana becomes distant from her own body, causing a split in her sense of self. When she finds out her father has died, Ondaatje likens Hana’s psychological detonation to the way “a man dismantling a mine broke the second his geography exploded,” using the mass fragmentation of land and bodies to create a visceral image of Hana’s mental breakage (44). Even the novel’s title for this section of the story is called “In Near
Ruins,” emphasizing Hana’s psychological disintegration. Hana’s trauma is also physical: during the war, Hana gives herself an abortion, physically destroying the life that her body has created. This self-induced violence is simultaneously an act of Schwab 15 agency, where Hana asserts her will over her body’s unwanted pregnancy, and an act of distancing, because the act further establishes the traumatic split between her mind and body. “After that I stepped so far back no one could get near me,” she says, her language emphasizing how an effort at physical distancing is used to describe her psychological distancing as well (91). When she catches a glimpse of herself in a mirror just after making the decision to stay in the villa with the English patient,
Hana doesn’t recognize the mirror’s representation of her body. By addressing herself as Buddy, the same name she used for all the dying soldiers in her care, Hana reveals the extent to which her identity has become split, trauma taking away the basic human ability to recognize one’s own body—a sign that mind and body are detached. Literary theorist Gabriele Schwab writes, “trauma kills the pulsing of desire, the embodied self,” drawing attention to the relationship between trauma and embodiment (95). Schwab’s theory resonates with Hana’s experience in The
English Patient, where the trauma of war creates a sense of detachment, the self and body splitting apart. Hana is so traumatized by the time that she decides to stay with the patient in the villa that the patient accurately diagnoses her as “more patient than nurse” (Ondaatje 102).
The decision to stay at the villa and take care of the patient is the act of agency that finally allows Hana to reassert control over her life and begin her healing process. Trauma theorist Cathy Caruth explains recuperation from trauma as a process of reintegration, in which the fragments of the “radically altered,” traumatized self are able to merge (Caruth quoted in Anderson, 34). Caruth’s framework of reintegrating fragments illuminates the process Hana takes toward Schwab 16 recuperation—by slowly fitting the pieces of her life back together. Once at the villa,
Hana is able to rediscover the connection between her mind and her body through sensory and physical experiences with objects. Simple, everyday objects like “her hammock and her shoes and her frock” help her rebuild a “miniature world,” a physical space with objects she can own and assert agency over (Ondaatje 49).
These objects become the stepping-stones toward a new reality where Hana can claim ownership first over things, then over herself. The materiality of her objects is more important than their utility in her life: “sometimes she collects several blankets and lies under them, enjoying them more for their weight than for the warmth they bring” (50). The physical weight of the blankets is a reminder of her corporeality. Hana’s focus on the sensory experience of weight is an attempt to realign the fragments of her psyche by reacquainting herself with the reassurances of perception—if she can feel the blankets resting on top of her, she can be confident of their existence and the existence of her own body. Cultural psychologist Ciaran
Benson’s claim that “sense of self is fundamentally conditioned by…embodiment and physicality” is visible in this desire for re-embodiment (23). In recuperating her sense of selfhood, Hana focuses on the process of embodiment, reacquainting herself with being in the world through an awareness of her body’s sensory capacities. Rather than working to physically and psychologically distance herself from the violence of war, Hana finds comfort in the reliability of objects. Ondaatje describes her relationship to the world in terms of her body, a strategy reminiscent of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology: “the relations between things or aspects of things [have] always our body as their vehicle” (373). As a result, Hana’s Schwab 17 relationship with books – objects that end up being tremendously significant in her recuperation from trauma – begins with their physical attributes and sensory properties rather than with their content:
For more than five minutes she had been looking at the porousness of the paper, the crease at the corner of page 17 which someone had folded over as a mark. She brushed her hand over its skin…she would ceremoniously pour herself a small beaker and carry it back to the night table just outside the three-quarter-closed door and sip away further into whatever book she was reading. (Ondaatje 7, emphasis mine)
Later in the novel, Ondaatje again describes Hana’s sensory experience in the villa’s library:
She had come to love these books dressed in their Italian spines, the frontispieces, the tipped-in colour illustrations with a covering of tissue, the smell of them, even the sound of the crack if you opened them too fast, as if breaking some minute unseen series of bones. (234, emphasis mine)
In these two descriptions, all five senses are activated: the sight of the paper, the touch of its “skin,” the taste as she “sips” the book, the smell of them, and the sound of opening an old book too quickly. The approach to the book is intrinsically sensory. Thing theorist Bill Brown explains that the thing’s “sensuous… metaphysical presence” defines its emblematic status (5). A book is not just a book
– it functions as a physical support system for the traumatized consciousness. When
Hana first sees Caravaggio, she “[needs] this table, this half-finished book in order to collect herself”; the book becomes as physically present and supportive as a table
(Ondaatje 33). The books rehabilitate Hana just as she uses them to rebuild the Schwab 18 house, the bombed state of the villa itself acting as a metaphor for the fragmented psyche. Hana nails several books together to rebuild several of the villa’s fire- charred stairs. She trusts their supportive quality as objects, their pages literally supporting her as she climbs out of the darkness of trauma.
While the physical book begins as a location of recuperation, the narrative within serves as a safe place where Hana can reacquaint herself with human and natural worlds. Ondaatje expresses this through a “language of location”: Hana doesn’t read books, she enters them, falls into them, becomes immersed in them
(Benson 5). They become doorways to landscapes and people, exotic and otherwise.
In this way, the book becomes an object that is able to “co-constitute consciousness and to move conscious persons beyond the boundaries of their own bodies into an external world shared with others,” becoming a “vehicle for self-expansion”
(Antonio Damasio quoted in Benson, 168). Hana’s relationship with books is so expansive that they become “half her world” as well as the crucial means by which she heals herself and the English patient, to whom she reads every night after giving him a dose of morphine (Ondaatje 7). The patient later reveals that “the only way
[he] could get her to communicate was to ask her to read to [him]” because she
“would not talk about (her trauma). She was distant from everybody” (269). The physical sensation of reading aloud merges Hana’s voice with the author’s, giving her the ability to embody the authorial voice’s narrative agency. Her reading is an active experience, the words becoming the sustenance she imbibes for strength and the drug that heals her trauma. Schwab 19
Hana’s experience with books reflects a distinctly Western concept of selfhood through authorship. As Hana works through her trauma and continues to recuperate herself through her experiences both with books’ materiality and the act of reading, she begins to assert further agency over the books she reads by writing pieces of her own story in their margins. In Western literary and philosophical ideas of self-making, the self is the intense, singular place of subjectivity and often articulates itself through the written word. Philosopher Charles Taylor explains the agency of authorship in terms of the artist, the individual genius who wrings meaning out of the objective world through the power of subjectivity. In doing so, the artist emerges as an author of objectivity as well as her own subjectivity, becoming “in some way the paradigm case of the human being, as agent of original self-definition” (Taylor quoted in Benson, 82). Similarly, Hana’s means of authorship in The English Patient progresses from embodying the authorial voice through reading, then writing in the margins of Kim, The Last of the Mohicans, and other books that she disguises amongst their unmarked kin in the villa’s library, and finally to writing a letter to Clara, her deceased father’s lover. The letter, which she writes at the end of the novel, is Hana’s first gesture of written communication that extends beyond marginalia. It signifies her acceptance of her father’s death, which contributed dramatically to her trauma, as well as her ability to bring her writing—a metaphor for her sense of self—into communion with others. At the end of the novel, Ondaatje reveals Hana to have recuperated from her trauma through agency gained with the support of books: “She tucked the book with the brown cover under her right arm…what she was now was what she herself had decided to become” Schwab 20
(Ondaatje 234). Now, he claims, she can recognize herself in a mirror—even if she is the only one who can. Ultimately, Hana’s internal split is healed at the expense of a new, externalized distance. She remains mysterious even to Ondaatje’, who claims
“she is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings”
(320).
The Fragmented Book: Historical Reconstruction and Contradiction
While books for Hana become spaces to imbue the traumatized self with agency, the patient uses his copy of Herodotus’s Histories to write himself into history. His relationship with The Histories— described as a “cradle,” a place of invention, a conglomeration of his thoughts and experiences and vast knowledge— is based on his rejection of the markers of Western identity, which include nation- states and names, and his desire to personally participate in historical documentation. However, underneath The Histories’ pages lurks the patient’s darker desire to absolve himself from the violence of his occupation: he is a cartographer for the Geographic Society. The Histories becomes the site of the tension between Western and non-Western identities and histories, revealing the book-object as a location of empowering self-definition and colonial violence.
The patient believes that he can separate his identity from his relationship to history and to national ties: “I wanted to erase my name and the place I had come from,” he claims (148). He rejects his national identity because he believes borders are unnatural. Countries drawing lines in the sand seems like a fragmentary construct in opposition to the desert, which “could not be claimed or owned…never Schwab 21 held down by stones” (147-148). As a metaphorical body that is whole, natural, and unable to be mapped in its entirety, the desert resists the artificial boundaries between nations. The empty and open geography of the desert enables the patient to recreate himself in its image, empowering him to leave his name behind and place himself both psychologically and physically in the desert’s openness. The desert allows him to reform his identity based on his own organic desires rather than the contexts of history: “the place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves…he was alone, his own invention” (126). Along with his need for self-invention outside a
European context, the patient desires to re-write history so that it aligns with his subjective experience in the desert. The patient claims that books are where
“history enters us,” but books are also where we can enter history (19). Thus, his act of retelling history resides in his copy of The Histories, where the patient pastes in pages from other books, scribbles observations, and writes episodes from his own story:
When he discovered the truth to what had seemed a lie, he brought out his glue pot and pasted in a map or news clipping or used a blank space in the book to sketch men in skirts with faded unknown animals alongside them (261).
The last case directly references history that exists outside of Western narratives, the stories of the desert that cannot be traditionally told using the rationality of modern history. But the revised, re-written book is able to incorporate the patient’s encounter with histories that lie outside the range of Western knowledge practice through marginalia, linguistic representation ceding to drawings and handwritten encounters. The Histories, rather than offering a static version of history to the Schwab 22 patient, is the location of a dialogue between Herodotus’s history of the desert and the patient’s own observations. In this way the physical object of The Histories acts as a totem of non-Western narrative and a map of the patient’s experience rather than a purveyor of objective fact.
While his copy of The Histories seems to be the “cradle” of the patient’s identity, the book leaves out his name: “There is still no clue to who he actually is, nameless, without rank or battalion or squadron” (102-103). And who is he, anyway? Over the course of the novel, Ondaatje leads the reader to understand that the patient is not English but the Hungarian count Ladislaus de Almásy, a cartographer who mapped Africa for the British before World War II, when he switched allegiances and began spying for the Nazis. The connection between
Almásy and the patient is consistently ambiguous: the patient will sometimes refer to Almásy in the third person and never affirms the other characters’ suspicions about his identity, “leaving them never quite sure who he was” (102). Regardless of his national heritage, the patient’s rejection of Westernized, subject-oriented identity combined with his disfigured, unidentifiable body brings him closer to the kind of identity lack he desires. However, this rejection is hollow because of his preoccupation with maps and his desire for “a fully named world” (23). When the patient gets lost in the desert, all he needs is “the name of a small ridge, a local custom, a cell of this historical animal, and the map of the world would slide into place” (20). Thus, while his desire to abandon national ties for more natural, geography-governed allegiances is more akin to the history left out of the Western tradition, the patient’s position as a cartographer and his ability to retain knowledge Schwab 23 paradoxically puts him in the tradition of the Western colonial. His beloved
Herodotus, who writes “the supplementary to the main argument,” the “cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history,” takes the form of “a sculpted portrait” on some editions of The Histories (126). Despite the patient’s imagining that Herodotus is
“one of those spare men of the desert who travel from oasis to oasis,” he is historically considered the Western world’s Father of History (126). While
Ondaatje’s narrative allows attempts at reconciliation, such as when the patient puts
Arabic and European texts side by side to further his research, this tension between desert traveler and Western colonial with funding from the Geographical Society in
London cannot be unresolved. Thus, self-invention through the desert only begets the mirage—a natural phenomenon of light distortion that becomes a metaphor for the displaced, transient self. Furthermore, the patient’s paradoxical ability to embrace the desert while maintaining his colonial position undercuts his idealized conception of history.
The Histories, while acting as the cradle of self-invention outside of a
European context, simultaneously situates the patient—and the book-object itself— within a Western colonial tradition of oppression and violence. As a cartographer and an active participant in mapping the African continent for the British
Geographical Society, the patient is directly involved in the creation of empirical textual documents that form the underpinning of British imperial control. His attitude toward the hypocrisy of his position is one of ignorance. In meetings of the
Geographical Society, “all human and financial behavior lies on the far side of the issue being discussed—which is the earth’s surface and its ‘interesting geographical Schwab 24 problems’” (142). The preoccupation with studying the Earth’s surface from a scientific perspective masks an inconvenient truth—that the ignored “human and financial behavior” underwrites a system of colonial violence. But rather than accepting the political implications of his actions, the patient chooses to blame other explorers who are preoccupied with naming:
…some wanted their mark there…Fenelon-Barnes wanted the fossil trees he discovered to bear his name. He even wanted a tribe to take his name, and spent a year on the negotiations. Then Bauchan outdid him, having a type of sand dune named after him. But I wanted to erase my name and the place I had come from. (148)
The scientific naming of fossil trees or sand dunes is vastly different from naming a tribe of native people, but the passage considers them all valid colonial actions.
Explorer Fenelon-Barnes believes that one can name a tribe through political negotiations—an act of language. These acts of naming are ultimately linguistic acts of power that establish control over both the land and its native people, the name itself a symbol of geographic and political authority. The explorer’s “first sight (by a white eye) of a mountain that has been there forever” is a bodily colonialism that reveals a Eurocentric mindset dependent on both physical and linguistic control over the natural world (151). Ondaatje explains this colonial paradigm in terms of
“servants and slaves and tides of power and correspondence with the Geographical
Society” (150). Power over people is intrinsically linked to modes of communication
(negotiations, correspondence), and to language in particular. The explorer sees, names, and claims the mountain: language, now implicated in the colonial act, contains the vestiges of power, both ideological and physical. Schwab 25
Losing Faith: The Book and the Violence of Colonialism
Because imperial powers used language as a tool of invasion and maintenance of power, books are similarly incriminated. Critic Carrie Dawson argues that Hana’s ability to use text as a recuperative space and her confusion between texts and bodies is based on a false binary. Dawson calls Hana’s literary imaginings “a fanciful and defensive act which is premised on an untenable opposition between textuality and violence” (61). Dawson points out that text, as a representative force, has a violent component as well. Inscribing text upon a body is part of this violence, as is the violence done to reality by representation. (Dawson
61) While Hana and the patient view books as objects that facilitate healing, self- invention, and agency over history, Ondaatje complicates his effusive descriptions of books by embedding them with violent implications. Even the patient, when he writes a book about the desert, dedicates it to a king, explicitly linking his work as a cartographer to the living body of imperialism. In The English Patient, the Germans use Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca as a codebook during World War II. In her article “The War and the Book: The Diarist, the Cartographer, and The English
Patient,” Alice Brittan argues that the book functions as an object of violence because of its ties to cryptography, imperialism, and war. “On the perimeter of what the book holds,” she writes,” we glimpse the faint historical shimmer of the modern
European nation, the double desire for political containment and aggressive expansion” (201). Brittan references books’ dual role as a means to express a Schwab 26 singular, dominant ideology—one based on reason, individuality, and subjectivity— and to spread that ideology, by force if necessary.
Brittan’s emphasis on books’ dual nature is complicated in the character of
Kirpal Singh or Kip, an Indian sapper who passively accepts his status as a second- class citizen in a European world for most of the novel. For Kip, books are objects fraught with tension because they contain the British codes of conduct that he cherishes while simultaneously reminding him of his exclusion from British culture—he is a subject but not a citizen. When Kip is waiting to interview for a position as a sapper in the British army, he looks at a series of books on a bookshelf only to be stared at by his future employer’s secretary: “He felt as guilty as if he had put the book in his pocket. She had probably never seen a turban before” (Ondaatje
200). Because books paradoxically provide Kip with access to British culture while simultaneously reminding him of his marginalization, he finds them untrustworthy:
Kip “[does] not yet have a faith in books” (117). This lack of faith in the written book is a fundamental difference between Kip and Hana/the patient, who both trust the book as a physical object and as a symbolic force. Hana depends on books so much that she rebuilds herself around them; the patient similarly uses books to renegotiate his place in history and his European identity. Kip, as a Sikh, does not have access to the same innate trust for the written word as his companions in the villa. His militant brother has taught him that books contain European narratives, ideologies, and justifications for violence. When he is perusing part of his bomb disposal kit, Kip begins reading a manual that attempts to explain, “when is an explosion reasonably permissible?” (224). Kip wonders, “who wrote such things?”— Schwab 27 the only logical answer is the British (224). The moment exposes the violent potential of the English language in an imperial context, where words are used to justify the taking of human lives. Kip’s conclusion is to hold writing and books at arms length, “as if language, humanity, would confuse him, get, like blood, into the machine he had to understand” (290). Language, for Kip, has blood on its hands.
Kip’s distrust is proven valid after the atomic bomb is dropped at the end of
World War Two. For him, the violence of the bombs is almost secondary to the violence done by “customs and manners and books and prefects and reason” that
“somehow converted the rest of the world…Was it just ships that gave you such power? Was it, as my brother said, because you had the histories and printing presses?” (301) The dissemination of information in the form of books contributes significantly to the novel’s most violent event, becoming the reason that Kip feels so betrayed by his British masters and helping him decide to return to India.
Through his various characters’ relationships with books, Ondaatje shows that the book as an object is dependent on the ideological perspective of its reader- subject. Books can simultaneously impart greater agency for a single subjectivity and take it away; the object then is fraught with the tension of ideological power structures. In my next chapter, I will explore how bombs—an object whose violent purpose hides a complex psychological force—are just as ideological as books.
Schwab 28
Chapter Two: Bombs
War is beautiful because—thanks to its gas masks, its terrifying megaphones, its flame throwers, and light tanks—it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machine. War is beautiful because it inaugurates the dreamed-of metallization of the human body. - Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto, on an aesthetic of war
The industrial revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries planted the seeds of what Mikael Hard and Andrew Jamison call the “if only” syndrome: “the eternal technical fixation that is deeply embedded in our underlying conceptions of reality” (5). As machines replaced human labor and became integral to production processes, technology became “the determinant of social and economic development,” the means to measure a culture’s dominance in the world
(Hard & Jamison 6). The hegemony of the machine fed a grand-narrative that progress, especially in science and technology, was a positive force that would improve living conditions and extend man’s dominion over the natural world; Hard
& Jamison describe the idea of progress as the industrial revolution’s “most important product” (25).
The logic of the progress imperative in turn supported a Western superiority complex because Western, industrialized societies saw themselves as more advanced than non-Western cultures. The West’s technologies became “key components of the civilizing-mission ideology that both justified Europe’s global hegemony and vitally influenced the ways in which European power was exercised,” whether that power was exercised through military force or cultural imperialism Schwab 29
(Adas 4). This technological superiority was used as justification for colonial dominance; Herbert Marcuse argues that the machine itself is “the most effective political instrument in any society whose basic organization is that of the machine process” (5). Drawing on Althusser’s argument that ideology is the means by which production is reproduced within society, Marcuse claims that technology is “the very embodiment of Reason,” and as such reveals that industrialized society is
“more ideological than its predecessor” (10-11). The mechanized perpetrators of colonial violence—the guns and bombs of European design—became more than simply agents of destruction. They became symbolic of the “achievements, atrocities and attitudes of European and American modernity,” epitomizing both the violence of colonialism and cultural supremacy committed against non-Western peoples
(Cirincione 17).
The idea that improvements in science and technology were always beneficial came under fire during World War I, when advanced killing machines resulted in the loss of a generation; by World War II, scientists and engineers were an integral part of the war effort to an extent never seen before (Hard & Jamison
251). Weapons represented untold death and destruction, but also embodied the power of Western technology, the grand narrative of progress taken to its logical extreme. Langdon Winner argues in his essay “Do artifacts have politics?” that material culture embodies systems of power and authority, and that machines in particular are built to uphold political structures. “The physical arrangements of industrial production, warfare, communications, and the like have fundamentally changed the exercise of power and the experience of citizenship,” he writes (122). Schwab 30
Winner’s emphasis on the human quotient is particularly relevant to my study of
The English Patient, where the war machine is connected not only to broad themes of colonial violence, but also is tightly linked to a character’s identity. In The English
Patient, the symbolic resonance of the bomb is particularly potent because Kip’s bodily affinity for weapons and other machines enables him to use the bomb as a space to negotiate his colonial identity. Similar to how Hana and the patient rely on the physical attributes of books and their emotional connection with them to recuperate their traumatized identities, Kip has an eerily close, even human, relationship with his gun and the bombs he defuses, despite these objects’ violent, mechanical properties. However, bombs exist within cultural hierarchies, as Kip realizes when the Americans end World War II by dropping atomic bombs on Japan.
The cataclysmic event awakens colonial trauma within Kip’s consciousness, resulting in a racial understanding of the bomb itself. The bomb then becomes both a symbol and perpetrator of ideologically charged violence.
English Fathers: War and the Western Weapon
Just as Hana uses books from the library to rebuild the ruined villa, war machines like fallen planes and tanks are repurposed in the desert. The Bedouin know “how to pick their way through such shipwrecks,” making tools and utensils from the metal of crashed planes, turning “a small bolt from a cockpit” into jewelry
(Ondaatje 5). The repurposing of Western machines also occurs in India, where cars
“were carried across a village into a sewing machine or water pump” (200). Kip doesn’t find this thriftiness in England, where instead he sees “a surfeit of parts that Schwab 31 would keep the continent of India going for two hundred years” (201). Ondaatje’s descriptions of repurposed objects are tied to colonial history. The colonizer has the industrial power and thus the luxury to discard fragments of machines, but colonized peoples like the Bedouin or the Indians are accustomed to using the scraps of more powerful cultures to make their sewing machines and water pumps.
A culture’s reuse of objects indicates a hierarchy of power and links material culture to its ideological context.
Bombs and guns, beyond being objects of violence, embody cultural idiosyncrasy and history. Italian fuses from Naples are put in vertically while bombs from Rome follow the German design. The metal bodies of bombs have cultural markers, structured by the “personality that had laid the city of threads and then poured wet concrete over it” (105). It is because of these cultural idiosyncrasies that the blindfolded patient can identify guns for the Bedouin, who ask him to “translate the guns” as if they were articulated through a different language (22). The
Bedouin’s store of guns come from different countries and times and the patient can recognize them just by “[brushing] the contours of the stock and magazine or
[fingering] the sight” (22). Their names are important. Just like the patient’s guns have cultural identities and names, the bombs of World War II are also identified by name, depending on their size: “A 2,000-pound bomb was called a ‘Hermann’ or an
‘Esau.’ A 4,000-pound bomb was called a ‘Satan’” (195). The names all have cultural connotations and references: ‘Hermann’ is a German name; ‘Esau’ is a son of Isaac in the Bible; and ‘Satan’ refers to the devil. These names are both human and mythic Schwab 32 and contain moral connotations, indicating an attempt to make the grave violence of the bombs’ presence more graspable to the human mind.
Lord Suffolk, Kip’s mentor, orients his pupil within the Western tradition, complicating Kip’s status as a non-Western character. Throughout most of the novel,
Kip remains seemingly unmindful of the post-colonial split in his identity.
Caravaggio accuses him and the patient of being “international bastards – born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere…though Kip doesn’t recognize that yet”
(188-9). Kip remains a passive recipient of his identity. Upon arriving in England,
“within a week his real name, Kirpal Singh, had been forgotten. “He hadn’t minded this,” a statement that reveals Kip’s ambivalence towards the Western tendency toward imbuing names with meaning or power, a theme Ondaatje explores in depth throughout the novel (94). Instead, Kip accommodates an English identity into his
Sikh roots by “[assuming] English fathers, following their codes like a dutiful son,” as he does with Lord Suffolk (229). For Hana, who is devastated by her displacement from her home country, Kip appears to be “one of the charmed, who has grown up an outsider and so can switch allegiances,” avoiding the problems of a displaced or split identity (289). However, despite his apparent ambivalence and integration into
English culture, Kip has a heightened awareness of “being the anonymous member of another race, a part of the invisible world” (209). After Lord Suffolk dies, Kip is
“expected to be the replacing vision” because “he contained, more than any other sapper, the knowledge of Lord Suffolk” (208). However, Kip refuses a leadership role, preferring to maintain his invisibility in the “anonymous machine of the army” and remain on the outside (208). Even at the villa, he pitches his tent on its borders Schwab 33 as opposed to staying inside with the Westerners. The villa is not a place of nationless-ness for Kip, or a place to rehabilitate and probe a displaced identity as it is for Hana. Instead, the villa is a place of violence, and he is there to do a job.
Intimate Defusing: The Psycho-Sensuality of the Bomb
Ondaatje uses the word “choreography” many times to describe Kip’s relationship to objects in the world. Choreography, commonly associated with the practice of putting together a dance, implies the movement of a body in relation to the space and objects around it. In The English Patient, there are choreographies of things and their hidden innards, choreographies of rooms and landscapes, and choreographies of power. By using the same word to describe both the body’s relationship to objects and the psyche’s relationship to tides of power and ideology,
Ondaatje compares body and object to mind and ideology. When Kip is defusing a bomb, on a surface level his body is navigating the mechanical object in front of him.
But on a deeper level, Kip is “pulled into a psychological vortex” (105). For Kip, this is his “only human and personal contact…this enemy who had made the bomb and departing brushing his tracks with a branch behind him” (111). This is how Lord
Suffolk, Kip’s mentor, teaches him to understand the bomb—by reading it. “People think a bomb is a mechanical object,” Suffolk tells him. “But you have to consider that somebody made it” (205). In this sense the bomb becomes a vitally human object that, just like the book, embodies the ideology of its maker—the ideology manifested in machines and supported by modern Western culture’s drive toward progress. Schwab 34
As the Germans retreat, they stash bombs in musical instruments, in the spines of books, in fruit trees. Embedding weapons in ordinary objects destabilizes the conception of where the war exists, turning ordinary rooms into potential battlefields. The sappers, the bomb defusers, “became permanently suspicious of any object placed casually in a room” (293). This fundamental distrust toward objects becomes a defining feature of the job and a central difference between Hana and Kip. Hana leans on objects, especially books, using them for support; Kip innately distrusts them, assuming they contain bombs.
While Kip distrusts the world around him initially, he deeply trusts his body, relying on sensory information to confirm the safety of his surroundings. Hana describes him as seeming “unconsciously in love with his body, with his physicalness, bending over to pick up a slice of bread, his knuckles brushing the grass, even twirling his rifle absent-mindedly like a huge mace” (79). By comparing
Kip’s rifle to a mace, a powerful weapon commonly associated with the medieval era, Ondaatje locates the rifle within the lineage of Western weaponry. In Kip’s hands, the violence of the gun carries the complications of Western colonial rule, but
Kip doesn’t experience the weapon on an abstract, historical level. He connects with the weapon through his hands, through physical contact, and as a result his hands become one of his most powerful tools. Just as Hana has a sensual, immersive relationship with her books, Kip experiences bombs through physical interaction.
Defusing a bomb means placing his head against it to hear the ticking inside; it requires feeling its weight. Critic Elizabeth Kella writes, “Kirpal puts his faith in physical sensation as a method of knowing,” underlining Kip’s fundamentally Schwab 35 phenomenological approach to his job and to his mode of being in the world (105).
His senses are the entryway to the mind of his opponent—who is not the machine itself but the mind that made it. Understanding the enemy comes through immersion, a different kind of reading: Kip must “[travel] the path of the bomb fuze again, alongside the mind that had choreographed this, touching all the key points, seeing the X ray of it” (Ondaatje 108). Kip’s ability to see inside bombs also applies to any room he enters. He is “unable to look at a room or field without seeing the possibilities of weapons there,” his three-dimensional gaze penetrating commonplace objects with ease (80). He “moves always in relation to things,” aware of how the external world defines and constrains his body (230). However, violence underlies many of his sensory experiences. The residue of violence even touches his eating practices because he uses a bayonet to stab holes in cans of condensed milk; he “[peels] the onions with the same knife he [uses] to strip rubber from a fuze wire” (92). He sees the world through his rifle’s telescope, catching glimpses of holy faces painted on the walls of churches he sleeps in as his unit moves up through
Italy. He sees a venerated statue of Mary from the other end of a gun as his unit passes through the Italian town of Gabicce.
Kip believes that his Sikh heritage is what gives him this affinity for machines: “he had come from a country where mathematics and mechanics were natural traits” (200). His relationship to guns, bombs and other mechanized objects is one of cultural heritage, history and personality, all of which have taught him about his character, the vague truths of his personality. He explains to Hana that
“Sikhs…were brilliant at technology,” even describing it as a “mystical Schwab 36 closeness…with machines” (289). His affinity for machines is revealed through his physical closeness with them and his ability to embody their moving parts. His familiarity and comfort with his gun makes it seem “as if the weapon had been sewn along his shoulders and arms and into his small brown wrists,” his body literally adopting the metal as part of itself (94). Defusing a bomb becomes an intimate physical encounter, “his thighs [bracing] the metal casing, much the way he had seen soldiers holding women” (222). This intimacy extends into Ondaatje’s descriptions of Kip himself. Just as the rifle seems as if it is sewn into his wrist, Kip’s mind is likened to radar sweeping a room: “As if his mind, even when unused, is radar, his eyes locating the choreography of inanimate objects for the quarter-mile around him, which is the killing radius of small arms” (93). The pumping of his heart is a piston.
In an attempt to humanize the destructive objects with which he works, the sapper describes the bombs he defuses as living or dead, putting bombs in the same category as organic species. Their ticking is like a heartbeat: “Those small mechanical semaphores were like a heart murmur or a stroke within a man crossing the street innocently in front of you” (223). When Kip looks at a bomb, he sees a mind attempting to play tricks on him rather than a series of chemical and mechanical reactions. By personifying the bomb, Kip translates the mechanical into the human, complicating the object’s status as a violent agent. Rather than attempting to defuse the terrifyingly infallible machine, Kip looks for the human error. He calls this the bomb’s joke, the word’s lighthearted connotations supporting his need to de-emphasize what might happen if he doesn’t get the joke—the bomb Schwab 37 could explode, and he could die. In situ with the bomb, Kip is facing a living enemy – they are “two suspicious creatures in an enclosed space” (223). Ondaatje compares his defusing techniques to surgery, the wires he cuts more like veins than copper covered in rubber. The snap of clipping a wire is like “the break of a small rabbit bone” (109). When he defuses the Esau bomb, Kip engages in a dance with the mechanical creature, “his body draped around the body of the Esau” in order to fully feel and thus understand it (222). By experiencing bombs as living creatures, Kip affords these enemy objects agency and intentionality.
While the bomb symbolizes the politics of technological progress, the weapon also transcends ideology because the violent reality of its purpose does not differentiate between protagonist and antagonist. Unlike the violent ideological undertones of books, bombs are overtly violent and cannot be encompassed by language. Kip recognizes the unspeakable nature of bombs: “he never speaks about the danger that comes with his kind of searching” (78). Language cannot express the mechanical complications of a bomb and so Kip doesn’t attempt the explanation.
When asked, he “[shrugs], not modestly, but as if it was too complicated to explain”
(113). The disembodied nature of language is antithetical to the fundamentally physical presence of the weapon. This is one of the central communication problems between Hana and Kip—while for Hana, language is primary, for Kip, language operates outside the physical sphere where he resides, and “the sapper’s body allows nothing to enter him that comes from another world” (133). He has a fundamental distrust for anything outside his body because “in the years of war he has learned that the only thing safe is himself” (230). Because language and Schwab 38 machines are incompatible, Kip cannot have what he calls the “human world” inside him when he works. But Hana’s body is a different story: even though “between them lay a treacherous and complex journey” he maintains, “if he could walk across the room and touch her he would be sane” (119).
Hana and Kip’s relationship is a central plot line that informs Ondaatje’s treatment of books and bombs. Ondaatje rarely depicts Hana and Kip in romantic scenes together, with the majority of their relationship explored through poetic exposition. Their first intimate interaction occurs when Kip is in the act of defusing a bomb and makes a mistake; he needs “a third hand” to hold two live wires so he can disable them (107). Hana takes the wires from him and as he defuses the device, he erases her presence, focusing entirely on the work at hand. However, once the bomb is dead, Kip finds he “[needs] to touch something human,” and Hana tells him that she thought she was going to die, and “we should have lain down together, you in my arms, before we died” (109). Brought together by the bomb, they brave death through touch, expressing a desire for each other’s bodies. Then they lay together on the grass and fall asleep; when Kip wakes up, he is annoyed with Hana because “she had made him owe her something”; human contact has jarred him, and he claims,
“the successful defusing of a bomb ended novels” (111). The statement, ironic because the novel ends with bombs exploding rather than bombs being disabled, suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of love, despite Kip’s assurance of his body. Kip resists Hana’s body despite his desire, for “how could he trust even this circle of elastic on the sleeve of the girl’s frock” (112). However, the next scene shows him relinquishing his distrust and his reliance on machines by cutting the Schwab 39 wire to the patient’s hearing aid and moving toward Hana, where the chapter cuts off and leaves the reader to imagine their first tryst. And yet, Ondaatje complicates their relationship by explaining, “they are only a step past the comfort she has given others in the temporary hospitals,” that “how much she is in love with him or he with her we don’t know” (133-4). Even Hana realizes “he never allowed himself to be beholden to her, or her to him” (135). They sleep next to each other, but distance remains between them despite their physical closeness (133).
A second significant scene between them occurs in the library after Kip has finished clearing it of mines. Kip surprises Hana when she is reading and they wrestle on the floor of the library, Hana’s books looking down on them. These are the worlds they share: the site of a mine and a library. And yet, her Canadian landscape is very different from his land of five rivers, and her love of books is counterintuitive to he who loves machines. Despite the vastness of their relationship within the text, they only spend a month together and maintain “a formal celibacy,” never consummating their feelings (237). The choice emphasizes the continued distance between them, their differences embedded in the image of the river. Hana desires “a river they could swim in,” a landscape of rebirth where she imagines they could create their own space (136). Kip associates rivers with the bridges he built and then pulled down during his time as an engineer in the army—rivers aren’t blank spaces for him, but instead colored by the blood of his fellow soldiers as the enemy shot at them through the water. Hana has “her own rivers,” but Kip knows that they cannot swim together (137). There is a racial charge to their interactions as well, with Hana almost fetishizing the brownness of Kip’s body. She “imagines all Schwab 40 of Asia through the gestures of this one man,” imagining his body as the entire continent (229). However, when he speaks of the issues within Asia, she “turns away from him” and “goes in to sit with the Englishman,” as if simultaneously protecting herself from “the feuds of the world” and maintaining her own Western allegiances (230). From their backgrounds to their ideological loyalties, Hana and
Kip have incompatible worldviews, for they both exist in a world where he is an
Other, where she has ideological access to books and he remains in the violent world of bombs. Their bodies remain separate “continents”; they are never able to create a “whole civilization” from their lovemaking, for ultimately the “very wide world” is too wide (237, 119).
Ideological Epiphany: The Bomb as Colonizer
While most of the bombs in The English Patient are noteworthy for their size, strength, and effect they have on Kip, two bombs in particular are the catalysts for a painful but clarifying awakening of colonial trauma. In a narrative moment when history crosses over into fiction, the Americans drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the novel, the bombings force the blurring between the English and
Indian aspects of Kip’s identity into a binary. In his anger, he points his rifle at the patient, who suddenly represents the colonizer. “American, French, I don’t care,” he tells the patient. “When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you’re an
Englishman” (304). The distinction between the English and other Europeans and their descendants collapses because of Kip’s personal victimization by the English.
He forces the world into a binary between white and brown, between the colonizer Schwab 41 and the colonized, the perpetrator and the victim. He knows “they would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation” (304). In his essay “The Whiteness of the
Bomb,” Ken Cooper writes, “The bomb appalls me, as the whale did Ishmael, because the properties of idealized whiteness are inseparable from its power” (80-81). The nuclear bomb represents the “very embodiment of Western technical mastery”; wrapped into its status at the forefront of global consciousness during the Atomic
Age was the understanding that only a white finger would press the button (Cooper
90). Cooper argues that the “ground zero” of the first bombs’ detonations was a
“figurative origin to orient [the ideological system’s] hierarchical structure” (95). In
The English Patient, Kip becomes fascinated with the location of this ground zero, imagining a city-sized bomb flooding the streets of Asia with fire. Ground zero is the visceral embodiment of modern, Western rationality taken to its most destructive, horrific end, the logical conclusion to technological progress. The nuclear bomb’s horrific violence comes to represent this “tremor of Western wisdom”: the extent to which one civilization will go in order to protect their ideological place in the world, regardless of human cost (Ondaatje 304, 302). In terms of macro-level Althusserian ideology, the use of violence to enforce ideology means that ideology itself has failed. Within the context of World War II, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki become emblematic of how the technological progress imperative was disastrous for humanity. For Kip, this failure manifests in a feeling of alienation and disgust at the Western aspects of his identity. In a moment of understanding and tragic recognition, Kip shuts off from the Western world because “he feels he can no longer Schwab 42 let anything approach him” (305). The trauma of history suddenly expresses itself, resulting in Kip’s feeling of dehumanization.
As Paul Williams writes in Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War: Representations of Nuclear Weapons and Post-Apocalyptic Worlds, “nuclear weapons are white weapons,” and “are used to buttress a racial order that privileges whiteness” (2). He argues that representations of the nuclear bomb in literature, film and other cultural texts have been a loaded location where identities are negotiated and articulated.
The bombs America dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki intimate the pervasive nature of white power over subjugated peoples across the world, but also function on a micro scale, affecting the identities of individuals. Cooper describes the atomic bomb as “a specifically Caucasian deity,” using the weapon as a place to interrogate white male identity (98). In The English Patient, Ondaatje describes Kip is in terms of his Sikh religious identity, despite the European gods he worships. During his travels through Italy, Kip “[brushes] the beards of Noah and Abraham and the variety of demons until he [reaches] the great face,” using his rifle’s telescope to get closer to painted representations of the West’s holy men (Ondaatje 83). For Kip, the sacred extends beyond his Sikh beliefs and his fascination with Western holy figures—he is a “warrior saint” who has a “mystical closeness” with machines (229-
30, 289). But Kip’s magic does not extend to the atomic bombs, which seem to him less like the mechanized bodies to which he is accustomed and more like elemental forces, releasing a “hurricane of heat withering bodies as it meets them” (302). The white man’s bomb leads to “those speeches of civilization from kings and queens and presidents” in far off lands, “wars like cricket,” abstractions removed from the Schwab 43 fiery streets of Asia (303, 301). He recoils not only from the violence, but also from the perceived casualness with which it is perpetrated, as if the white man is playing
God.
Kip’s disgust at his English mentors and horror at his complicity in Western modes of thinking echoes writer and thinker Arundhati Roy’s reaction to India’s creation of a nuclear bomb in 1998. While the contexts of the two events are historically distant, both Kip and Roy register a deep shock at the affect nuclear weapons have on their psyches. In her essay “The End of Imagination,” Roy blames
“The Men who made it happen…the United States of America” for introducing the bomb to the world (11). Kip literally has a physical relationship with bombs, and
Roy uses a similar metaphor to impress the importance of the moment on her reader. “The bomb isn’t in your backyard,” she writes, “It’s in your body” (12). For
Kip, the bomb is an extension of his body and the merging of the two enables his sacred connection with machines, but Roy conceives of the bomb as a penetration into the body of India—a colonial invasion. The bomb is “the ultimate colonizer.
Whiter than any white man who ever lived. The very heart of whiteness” (Roy 11-
12). She states that one of India’s reasons for making the bomb is to expose Western hypocrisy, but she counters with the fact that the bomb only exposes the West’s arrogance—“they have more money, more food, and bigger bombs,” all equally important status symbols in a modern world (25). If India now sets itself in competition with the West rather than taking the moral high ground of not making a nuclear weapon, it will lose, Roy claims. The real reason for India to create a bomb, she posits, is that the weapon offers “a national cause,” a “search for selfhood” (27). Schwab 44
For Roy, the creation of an atomic bomb is fundamentally due to anxiety about
Indian national identity, forged within borders drawn by the British. Roy’s conception of the bomb as a means of constructing identity resonates with Kip’s experience of the bomb. When the atomic bombs are dropped on Japan, Kip realizes the submerged duality of his identity—rather than acting as a crutch for identity, the bombs serve to elucidate his misperceptions about the West.
After trusting Lord Suffolk and the patient, fighting for the English, and diffusing bombs for the English, Kip realizes that he no longer wants to be English.
He cannot rehabilitate or even realize the split in his identity while working as a sapper because internally he had subjugated his Sikh identity in favor of an English one. In order to begin a process of uncovering his identity as a Sikh, he reclaims his name, declaring that “his name is Kirpal Singh and he does not know what he is doing here” (Ondaatje 305). For Kip (though it is now more appropriate to call him
Kirpal Singh), his physical location suddenly becomes vital to reestablishing who he is. Because it will take him awhile to get back to India, Kirpal retreats first to machines, specifically to the motorbike he arrived on. In contrast to the death he imagines from the bombings, he kicks “the motorbike to life and [sits] on it while it half [bucks], alive under him” (307). The life of the machine becomes a shelter from the outside world, speeding Kirpal away from Hana and the destroyed villa.
However, he “feels he carries the body of the Englishman with him in this flight,” maintaining a connection to the past despite his desire to disassociate from it (312).
In his final moments in the narrative, he is driving across a bridge, the motorbike loses its grip, and both fall into the river. The next time the reader encounters Schwab 45
Kirpal, he is back in India—his descent into the river is a cultural baptism, a spectacular failure of the machine under the crushing weight of the human psyche.
Schwab 46
Conclusion: Toward a Relational Identity
Echoing Bill Brown’s assertion that history can now begin with things, I have shown that thing theory is a productive way of thinking about Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient. Within the world of The English Patient, objects are particularly relevant to characters’ identity construction because of their sensory properties and ideological significances. Books, objects that embody Western conceptions of subjectivity and agency, simultaneously enact and represent colonial violence. Bombs, as objects of seemingly ubiquitous destructive force, can also act as vessels for human contact, epiphany, and identity. As a result, objects become the spaces of negotiation for characters whose identities have been pressured by wartime trauma, history, and colonialism. In The English Patient, objects become more than just a motif—they become a way of structuring character development and locating characters within ideological frameworks. Books and bombs, when placed side by side, activate such ideological tensions: what is empowering to some is violent to others. This exchange extends to the object’s relationship to identity, giving new weight to the effect of environment on selfhood.
The English Patient’s ending foregrounds the importance of objects to the narrative. In an epilogue-like section set years in the future, Kirpal Singh sits at dinner with his family. The novel’s last paragraph witnesses a moment of cross- temporal and cross-spatial movement, where Hana knocks a glass from her cupboard in Canada while Kirpal’s daughter simultaneously drops her fork—but
Kirpal catches the fork in midair while Hana’s glass presumably shatters on the Schwab 47 floor. The alignment of the moment gestures toward the section’s portrayal of Hana and Kirpal’s continued connection as almost magical: “he sees her always, her face and body…this is a limited gift he has somehow been given, as if a camera’s film reveals her, but only her, in silence” (319). Their connection, channeled through the glass and the fork, contains Ondaatje’s signature emotionally charged poetry. It could be read as a moment of hope or of dissonance, but ultimately either reading is insufficient. Instead, The English Patient’s non-rational, ambiguous, emotional ending is another way of disrupting Western ideology’s focus on conclusive, linear, empirical modes of thinking. Ondaatje, himself a product of postcolonial structures, undermines the need for resolution with a moment that is at once uplifting and disruptive. By gesturing to an otherworldly connection between Kip and Hana that transcends national and cultural boundaries, Ondaatje seems to end The English
Patient with hope. But hidden inside is a postcolonial critique of identity that offers an alternative model to the Enlightenment liberal subject. He gives us a vision of embodied subjectivity that is fundamentally relational, that depends heavily on the negotiation between internal and external worlds. Identity then rests simultaneously inside and outside the self, defined by the mental game that exists between ideology and identity.
Schwab 48
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