Version classiqueVersion mobile

Frontières, marges et confins

 | 
Corinne Alexandre-Garner

Topographies postcoloniales

The Borders of Fidelity : Cosmopolitan Ethics in Ondaatje’s The English Patient

John U. Peters

Texte intégral

  • 1 . Two Cheers for Democracy. New York : Harcourt, 1951, 68, 73.
  • 2 Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient (1992). New York : Vintage, 1993.
  • 3 . Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera, 2 nd ed. San Francisco : Aunt Lute, 1999, XIX. On cu (...)
  • 4 . The English Patient, 139.
  • 5 . Ibid., 254.

1In his 1939 essayWhat I Believe” E. M. Forster boldly states, “I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” Later in the same essay, he adds the equally bold description of the friends he has in mind : “an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky” whose “members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages”1. Let me suggest that such raising of friendship above nationality, along with Forster’s leveling faith in a personality-based “aristocracy” transcending space and time, provides an ethical model for what is now being called the new cosmopolitanism. Let me further suggest that this new cosmopolitanism is what Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient2 is largely about. Before proceeding, I want to recall also a quotation from Gloria Anzaldúa about border phenomena that are different from those established by nations. She writes of “[t] he psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands” which are “physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy”3. Such cultural juxtapositions are also what The English Patient is about, and they account for much of the novel’s sophistication. But my main objective is to apply E. M. Forster’s criteria as a test to see which, if any, of the major characters in The English Patient appears qualified to join the “aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky.” First, let us consider the novel’s title character, the English patient himself. Almásy is a wandering cartographer doubly seduced, first by the freedom of the Libyan desert and second by Katharine Clifton, the wife of a British colleague. The result of the first seduction is that Almásy has become an ardent post-nationalist : “Erase nations !” he says. “I was taught such things by the desert”.4 The result of the second seduction is a tempestuous love affair that goes public, torments everyone involved, and eventually drives Katharine’s husband to attempt double murder and suicide. After Geoffrey Clifton has managed to kill only himself, Almásy shelters the badly injured Katherine in the Cave of Swimmers, then sets out alone to seek help. The war intervenes in ways that prevent him from returning to the cave for years. In the course of his odyssey, he agrees to guide a German spy across the desert to Cairo.5

  • 6 . Ibid., 138.

2At issue for some readers may be the question of whether Almásy’s aiding the German spy constitutes betrayal of one’s nation—i. e., treason. Without consulting a lawyer, I assume the answer must be no. In the novel Almásy is not really English, after all, and by estimating his age one realizes that his probable birth-nation, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, has ceased to exist. The mystery of his nationality is somewhat beside the point ; however, during desert expeditions with fellow European colleagues he has rejected nationalism altogether : “1932 and 1933 and 1934. [...] Just the Bedouin and us, crisscrossing the Forty Days Road. There were rivers of desert tribes, the most beautiful humans I’ve met in my life. We were German, English, Hungarian, African—all of us insignificant to them. Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states”6.

3Nevertheless Almásy does in effect betray his British friends and colleagues, especially Madox, by aiding their country’s enemy after the war has begun. For that alone he could fail the Forster test. Moreover, Almásy’s conduct with Katharine Clifton raises further doubts. Does his prolonged return to the desert cave count as evidence of – to borrow Hélène Cixous’term – extreme fidelity. Opinions may differ. When finally he arrives at the cave, he regards Katharine’s remains as though she were still alive :

  • 7 . Ibid., 170.

I approached her naked as I would have done in our South Cairo room, wanting to undress her, still wanting to love her. What is terrible in what I did ? [...] There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language. Felhomaly. The dusk of graves. With the connotation of intimacy between the dead and the living.7

  • 8 . The English Patient, 258, 260. Wepwawet (or Upwawet), the “opener of ways” is a deity associated (...)

4There is something demonic about Almásy. His identifying himself elsewhere with Wepwawet, the Egyptian jackal god and “opener of ways,” as well as with the “demon lover,”8 should not be taken lightly.

5Earlier and alive, Katharine Clifton betrays her morally rigid husband, Geoffrey, whom she begins to fear once Almásy becomes obvious in his desire for her. In effect she falls victim to her own magnetism and the rivalry of two unstable men. She cannot change Almásy nor prevent her husband from going mad. Nor does the “wall of her class” ever come down. “You built your walls too, she tells him, so I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he cannot stand.” In effect she is locked within the studied conventionality of the English upper class, her defensive proof of which torments Almásy, her socially detached lover

  • 9 . The English Patient, 155.

When she is within the wall of her class and he is beside her in larger groups he tells jokes he doesn’t laugh at himself. [...] But she will not even catch his eye. She smiles to everyone, to the objects in the room, praises a flower arrangement, worthless impersonal things. She misinterprets his behaviour, assuming this is what he wants, and doubles the size of the wall to protect herself.9

  • 10 . One should apply the term “existential freedom” to Almásy’s behavior reservedly. Consider the fol (...)

6Behind that same wall her husband waits, politely going mad. Geoffrey’s attempt to kill both his wife and himself by a deliberate plane crash is almost predictable. The “wall of class” he has shared with Katharine has protected neither of them from the existential freedom that Almásy and the desert represent.10 The “English” patient, a man without a country, never actually dies in the novel but simply disappears from the narrative like one of Herodotus’lost civilizations in the desert. In this novel the truly English characters—Lord Suffolk, Madox, Geoffrey, and Katharine—die inside the walls of their culture.

7Of the remaining major characters, three—David Caravaggio, Kirpal Singh, and Hana—survive the war. Caravaggio is surely the most paradoxical of the three. A thief by trade, he betrays public trust in general but not his native Canada, which he serves as a spy. Nor does he betray his companions in the Villa San Giralomo. He is a mentor to Hana, a sympathetic friend to Almásy and Kip, He is from Hana’s viewpoint also an artist, one with mutilated hands, who accepts his fate. Like his seventeenth-century namesake, Caravaggio, he knows the back streets of cities and the secrets of those who live in shadows. Though he has lived his life outside of legal bounds, one senses he could pass the test.

8Another prominent character, Kirpal Singh, exemplifies the military ethics of devotion to one’s duty. As a sapper—a defuser of mines and bombs—Kip is a paragon of stoical grace under pressure. He is also a devout Sikh, both in his readiness to face death and in his restraint with Hana, whom he loves and sleeps with in celibacy. He befriends both Caravaggio and Almásy. Yet Kip’s stoicism also represses a deep rage against white racism. After he hears radio reports of the Americans’atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that rage finally erupts in front of the patient he assumes is English :

  • 11 . The English Patient, 283. For a plausible answer to Kip’s question, see Anderson, B. “The Origins (...)

I grew up with traditions from my country, but later, more often from your country. Your fragile white island that with customs and manners and books and prefects and reason somehow converted the rest of the world. You stood for precise behaviour. I knew if I lifted a teacup with the wrong finger I’d be banished. If I tied the wrong kind of knot in a tie I was out. Was it just ships that gave you such power ? Was it, as my brother said, because you had the histories and printing presses ?
You and then the Americans converted us. With your missionary rules. And Indian soldiers wasted their lives as heroes so they could be pukkah. You had wars like cricket. How did you fool us into this ?11

9The shock of what he believes to be a racist atrocity ends Kip’s imperial border-crossing friendships. It leads also to his abrupt abandonment of Hana, despite her love for him. The novel implies that years later Kip regrets his decision. But he maintains his resolve never to see her again or even reply to her letters. Kirpal Singh is a brave man and a heroic soldier. As Hana’s friend and lover, however, he fails the test.

  • 12 The English Patient, 41.
  • 13 . Ibid., 41-42.

10But then, finally, there is Hana herself, whom any reader of The English Patient would be remiss not to recognize as a saint. She alone among the major characters fits all the criteria I have abstracted from Forster. Must she choose between betraying her friend and betraying her nation ? The answer is yes. As a Canadian military nurse she does so, albeit in a minor and unpunishable way, by deciding to stay behind at the Villa San Girolamo with her patient instead of following orders to evacuate. She is told that her decision is “like desertion”12. The ethical issue is thereby drawn for the reader. But for Hana herself there is no question of which commitment to make : “She was warned of the uncleared mines, lack of water and food. She came upstairs to the burned man, the English patient, and told him she would stay as well”13. In so doing, she crosses into a sort of postmodern waste land, to make of what she can :

  • 14 Ibid., 43.

The villa San Girolamo, built to protect inhabitants from the flesh of the devil, had the look of a besieged fortress, the limbs of most of the statues blown off during the first days of shelling. There seemed little demarcation between house and landscape, between… the damaged building and the burned and shelled remnants of the earth. To Hana the wild gardens were like further rooms. She worked along the edges of them aware always of unexploded mines. In one soil-rich area beside the house she began a garden with a furious passion that could only come to someone who had grown up in a city. In spite of the burned earth, in spite of the lack of water. Someday there would be a bower of limes, rooms of green light.14

11The devastated garden is an apt chronotope for a war fought by border-crossing armies firing heavy artillery and sowing land mines in their wake. That there now seemed “little demarcation between. the damaged building and the burned and shelled remnants o the earth” implies a rape of civilization. War has also tested the borders of human fidelity, creating indefinite spaces where maps and promises mean nothing. Throughout, however, Hana remains the good Samaritan, the nurturing presence, the life force in the ruins of war. She treats her patient with morphine and kindness, sensivity and devotion. The wounded souls gather round her as if she were a candle in the darkness. She is a perfect example of Forster’s aristocracy.

Notes

1 . Two Cheers for Democracy. New York : Harcourt, 1951, 68, 73.

2 Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient (1992). New York : Vintage, 1993.

3 . Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera, 2 nd ed. San Francisco : Aunt Lute, 1999, XIX. On cultural cartography relating to science and religion, see also T. F. Gieryn. Cultural Boundaries of Science. Chicago : Univ. of Chicago P,, vii-xii, 1-35, 43-46.

4 . The English Patient, 139.

5 . Ibid., 254.

6 . Ibid., 138.

7 . Ibid., 170.

8 . The English Patient, 258, 260. Wepwawet (or Upwawet), the “opener of ways” is a deity associated with war and death. God of the necropolis at Abydos, he may have inspired a funerary cult. See Morenz, Siegfried. Egyptian Religion. Ithaca : Cornell Univ. Press, 1992, 271.

9 . The English Patient, 155.

10 . One should apply the term “existential freedom” to Almásy’s behavior reservedly. Consider the following passage from Simone de Beauvoir : “The truth is that in order for my freedom not to risk coming to grief against the obstacle which its very engagement has raised, in order that it might pursue its movement in the face of failure, it must, by giving itself a particular content, aim by means of it at an end which is nothing else but precisely the free movement of existence.” See The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. B. Frechtman, New York : Philosophical Library, 1948, 29. For a discussion of the desert motif, see Delmas, C. L’Écriture du désert de Burton à Ondaatje, in Confluences 22. Nanterre : Publidix, 2003, 37-52.

11 . The English Patient, 283. For a plausible answer to Kip’s question, see Anderson, B. “The Origins of National Consciousness,” in Imagined Communities. London : Verso, 1991, 37-46.

12 The English Patient, 41.

13 . Ibid., 41-42.

14 Ibid., 43.

Le texte et les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont sous Licence OpenEdition Books, sauf mention contraire.

Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search