Michael Ondaatje: Haptic Aesthetics and Micropolitical Writing

Michael Ondaatje

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Michael Ondaatje Haptic Aesthetics and Micropolitical Writing

Milena Marinkova

Continuum International Publishing Group Inc 80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038 The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX www.continuumbooks.com Copyright © 2011 Milena Marinkova All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Marinkova, Milena. Michael Ondaatje : haptic aesthetics and micropolitical writing / Milena Marinkova. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-9439-8 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Ondaatje, Michael, 1943—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR9199.3.O5Z77 2011 813’.54--dc22 2011008212 ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-9439-8 (hardcover)

Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

1 4 12

The Multiple Senses of the Haptic A Touch Affectionate but Troubling Michael Ondaatje: Writing Politically with a Difference 1.

2.

3.

Epilogue:

Haptic Writing as Affective Cinema Hapticizing the “I”/“Eye” in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid Coming through the Haptic Cut: History in the Making and Coming through Slaughter Humble Affections of the Cinematic: Michael Ondaatje’s Films of the 1970s Haptic Aesthetics and Witness Writing “Touching into Words”: The Intimacy of Witness Writing in Running in the Family Witnessing the Body/The Body Witnessing in Anil’s Ghost Haptic Writing and Micropolitical Betrayals “A Falling Together of Accomplices” in In the Skin of a Lion: Writing, History, Betrayal Between the Grope of the Hand and the Sight of a Rifle: The Betrayal of Propinquity in The English Patient Betrayals of the Cinematic: Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient The Haptic in Literature: Hiding, Playing, Educating

20 29 34 44 56 63 69 80 93 99

112 125

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Notes Bibliography Index

Contents

142 181 198

Acknowledgments “There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly,” says Anna, the narrator in Michael Ondaatje’s latest novel Divisadero. And on the following pages I would like to unveil the many voices — public and private — that have informed my work: friends, colleagues, networks, and institutions for whose unselfish, thoughtful, and wholehearted support I am grateful. The preparation and completion of this book would not have been possible without the generosity of the Department of English and American Studies at Sofia University and the British Council in Bulgaria; the School of English, the Centre for Canadian Studies, and the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CentreCATH) at the University of Leeds; the British Association for Canadian Studies; Universities UK; and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). At different stages of my academic career, these institutions and centers have provided much needed financial support for conducting the research and joining academic groupings fundamental to this project. I would also like to thank Danielle Fuller at the University of Birmingham, Rachel Carroll at the University of Teesside, and Simon Popple at the University of Leeds for providing me with exciting teaching opportunities, as well as valuable additional income for the completion of the manuscript. I have been fortunate to be part of the vibrant academic communities at the universities of Sofia, Leeds, Birmingham, and Teesside, which have inaugurated lasting intellectual friendships. My special thanks to Sam Durrant for his continued support, guidance, and advice over the years; Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Patricia Waugh, Madeleine Danova, Graham Huggan, Stuart Murray, Shirley Chew, and Griselda Pollock, who have been scrupulous and encouraging readers of various earlier versions of individual sections of the manuscript. I would like to acknowledge the contribution of the participants in the School of English Postgraduate Research Seminar series (2004–2007) and the Migratory Aesthetics Workshops (co-organized by CentreCATH and ASCA in 2005–2006); their friendly feedback and lively ideas have triggered a number of stimulating conversations — within and beyond this book.

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Acknowledgments

Gillian Roberts, Jeffrey Orr, and Natalie Diebschlag have readily and enthusiastically taken part in many an Ondaatje-inspired discussion. Without the intellectual and emotional support of my dear friends Abigail Ward, Alberto Fernández Carbajal, Annette Seidel-Arpacı, Charlotte Kearns, Edel Porter, Elizabeth Throesch, Gareth Jackson, Ina Valcheva, Ingrid Young, Joanne Lupton, Kaley Kramer, Kerri Andrews, Lily Tai, Marcel Swiboda, Martina Johneff, Michelle Gewurtz, Nasser Hussain, Patricia McMahon, Reshma Jagernath, Sam Francis, Sam Wood, Snezhina Momova-McVeigh, Stefan Wanitschka Koenig, Susan Anderson, and Yeliz Biber, my life in Leeds — and thereabouts — would have been solitary, monotonous, and definitely unhealthy. A big and heartfelt thank you to Catherine Bates, Donna McCormack, and Dominic Williams, who have not only read, proofread, and commented on significant parts of this book, but have always had confidence in my work and offered love, support, and understanding in moments of joy as well as in times of hardship. And, last but not least, a long-distance but nonetheless warm thank you to my family, Bonka, Dobrich, and Veselin Marinkovi, whose dedication, support, and generosity have been a bright example for me during this long journey. Part of Chapter 2 has been adapted from my article “‘Perceiving [. . .] in one’s own body’ the violence of history, politics and writing: Anil’s Ghost and witness writing,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 44 (3) (2009): 107–25. Versions of my essays “Framing fame: Michael Ondaatje’s cinema of liminality and affection,” Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, 10 (2) (2010): 7–19 and “Speaking not about, but nearby: Michael Ondaatje’s cinematic writing and the haptic,” Cinematic Strategies in XXth Century Narratives, eds. Teresa Prudente and Federico Sabatini (New York: Cambria Press, 2010): pp. tbc, have also been used in Chapter 1. I am grateful for the permission to revise and reuse this material. Finally, I would like to thank Haaris Naqvi at Continuum, without whose assistance, patience, and encouragement this book would not have been possible.

Introduction American movies, English books — remember how they all end? [. . .] The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He’s going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That’s enough reality for the West. It’s probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.1

Thus speaks an impassioned Gamini, one of the main characters in Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost (2000). In what has been identified as the Canadian author’s most politically ambivalent work, the outburst of the Sri Lankan doctor in front of the Westernized protagonist Anil — and by extension all those imaginatively reconstructing the conflict “over there” from the relative safety of their Western homes — is permeated with cynicism, despair, and anger with politics and cultural production. The predictability of the Western plot is tiresome, according to Gamini, and its ideological underpinnings infuriating. If the safe-yet-mobile external positioning of the (Western) “hero” allows him to physically visit and imaginatively revisit the exotic “somewhere,” those on the other side of the historiographic process — trapped within the volatile triangle of Mombasa, Vietnam, and Jakarta — are passive and disposable, simultaneously contained by History and disembodied by political writing. Such film-inspired heroism — a short-lived sojourn in a tumultuous region, followed by an untimely retreat, which is subsequently compensated for by a hopeful glance over the shoulder, through the window, and amidst the clouds — is also reminiscent of the temporal disjunctions and spatial conquests brought about by colonial and imperialist practices to the non-Western “somewhere.” For the hero and his audience, the violent adventure abroad “naturally” fades into an erotic encounter on the way home, thus closing the fictional circuit with a love triangle rather than a political impasse: love and war are equally attractive to the eye of the camera/reader — they make and sell good stories.

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The foregrounded departure of the filmic apparatus in the passage on the previous page highlights the mediated nature of the scene — the slippage from reality reproduction to reality production. A metaphor for mobility, just like the airplane and the hero, the camera facilitates the diegetic migration between settings, as well as the formal transition between shots. But the filming device also relies on a physical body for its operation and on a consciousness for its “imagination”; its artistry is assessed against the marketability of the final product and its ideological efficiency depends on the loyalties of its distributors. Therefore, against the purported disembodied omniscience of the camera (in the vein of T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative”), Ondaatje has pitted its emplacement in specific material and cultural contexts. Gesturing at the vacuity of certain strands of (political) writing, this episode exposes the ideological premises underpinning such normalizing discourses by using the cinematic metaphor. At the same time, Gamini’s curt and seemingly impartial expressions — “That’s it,” “that’s enough,” “to all purposes” — also convey a sense of succinctness and finality as immediate as a film cut. His speech, however, is highly political and deeply emotional: opening with a direct rhetorical question to Anil (and the reader), it describes in a list of script-like directions (in the present tense and active voice) the maneuvers of the compromised Western hero then culminates in a conclusive statement about Western political writing and a series of imperatives addressed to Anil (a reader or even a writer). Gamini, thus, not only contests the appropriations of the West and its ideological apparatuses but also assumes narrative agency through his assertive tone and brave universalizations. His subversive speaking back to the Western script, and thereby metaphorically taking the director’s seat, is complemented by his qualitatively different response — one that is visceral and emotive (but not sensational), stripped of unnecessary qualifiers, and frank about its political affiliations. The contestation of political universalism in Gamini’s speech is bound up with the challenge to the ocularcentrism of cinematic narratives that the quoted passage performs.2 Sight, as the paramount sense of distant perception and abstraction, is easily equated in this scenario with the reductive and universalizing “gaze” of the Western political fictions that Gamini critiques.3 Defying conventional representations of the imagination as a disembodied “mind’s eye,” Ondaatje’s literary camera draws attention away from the visual to focus on the somatic experiences of those involved in cultural production.4 The narrative zoom-in on the hero’s exhausted body and on the camera lends solidity to the film star–turned–political writer (or colonial-turned-tourist-turned-neocolonial) and context to the culture industries that he represents. Simultaneously with the embodiment and emplacement of the otherwise abstract yet ubiquitous Western gaze,

Introduction

3

Ondaatje directs the reader’s gaze to their own reading practices. If, on one hand, leaving behind the vague “somewhere” and following the hero’s journey home are symptomatic and constitutive of particular kinds of knowledge, turning the gaze back on a bodied Western male subject and a tangible recording device forcefully fleshes out the implication of the reader in (historically, politically, and sexually) situated acts of representation on the other.5 Cultural production is presented as always already inscribed in an industry premised on geopolitical inequalities — the writing of the book can only take place in the relative comfort of the Western home, where the market circuit is functioning smoothly. But the circuit that I would like to focus on, and which I will argue is central to Ondaatje’s writing as a whole, is significantly more elusive and effective: the circuit of affects. As already pointed out, Gamini’s speech is not only ideologically loaded against the claims for universality and impartiality of Western political fictions but also heavily reliant on a significant affective appeal to the listener (Anil) and the reader. This emotional charge is conveyed through rhetorical questions, elisions, imperatives, and ambiguous pragmatic structures; it is directed at the West — its culture industries and customers/readers — and aims to expose and disrupt, implicate and stir. Apportioning blame is not enough; Gamini’s imperatives demand action, departure, and involvement. In line with his occupation, the Sri Lankan doctor wills to surgically remove the ideologically compromised Western-style actors from his conflict-torn homeland and secure them with a writing commission back in their Western homes; in this sense, writing — especially of the Western variety — acts as a quarantine chamber that will prevent such misplaced actors from inflicting more pain or infecting more people. The verdict passed on writing in this case is one of political noncommittal and passivity, an activity as dissociated from real life as Western fictions are distant from the reality “somewhere.” At the same time, Gamini is fully aware of the powerful hold these stories can have over their readers; part and parcel of circuits of meaning and knowledge, fictions appeal to the cognitive, affective, and somatic aspects of their reader’s being. Thus, while the verbal manifestations of perturbation in Gamini convey his state of mind, Ondaatje’s shift of focus on to the body of the Western hero highlights the conjunction of cognition and emotion, feelings and sensations, culturally produced knowledge and corporeal experiences on the pages of a book. The shift from the tired hero to the circuit of readers that a book can “touch” also suggests the intersubjective nature of the affects produced by writing, affects that extend beyond the private to reach other consciousnesses and bodies, affects that are psychological yet somatic, supra-individual yet intimate. Their embodied and emotive character parallels the immediate and metaphorical meanings of “touch”;

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the foundational character of tactile sensibility informs all the other senses just as the intersubjective nature of affect transcends the boundaries of the subject and the individual body. This book, therefore, will argue that such affective impact can be achieved through an aesthetic of multisensory, fluid, and historically inflected writing. I have chosen to call this aesthetics “haptic” for its reliance on the bodily, the sensual, the material, even though the term has so far been applied primarily to visual or plastic works of art.6 Such an aesthetic forges an intimately embodied and ethically responsible relationship among audience, author, and text, as it renounces the Cartesian split between mind and body, the dialectical subsumption of the object into the subject, and the dehistoricization of a phenomenological subject. Furthermore, I will demonstrate how Ondaatje’s brand of aesthetics has an empowering micropolitical potential,7 which partakes of the political domain without entirely discarding the invocation of the beautiful and the affective. Haptic aesthetics rejoices in the exploration of the intimate space of the bodily and the microsocial space of the interpersonal. At the same time, this kind of art does not embrace pure mimesis for didacticism nor does it fall victim to the phenomenological valorization of subjective intentionality. It is through such embodied haptic acts of proximity that Ondaatje conveys (without betraying) the traversals of the personal by social and political structures. His literary camerawork goes beyond traditionally reductive definitions of aesthetics as metaphysics of the beautiful and the disinterested or as bourgeois mystification of hegemonic ideology. Ondaatje’s is a moving camera that approximates, I will argue, Isobel Armstrong’s quest for an empowering “radical aesthetic”:8 reliant on playful ambiguity and the creative tension between the everyday and the artistic, it escapes the strictures of political and literary taxonomies, while acknowledging its implication in dominant regimes of cultural production. Both by exposing the complicity of the aesthetic with the political and rejecting the crude politicization of art, Ondaatje’s works thus defy the reductive dichotomy set up between art and reality, representation and politics.

The Multiple Senses of the Haptic The thin sheaf of information. Why did my senses stop at you? There was the sentence, “Buddy Bolden became a legend when he went berserk in a parade . . .” What was there in that, before I knew your nation your colour your age, that made me push my arm forward and spill it through the front of your mirror and clutch myself? Did not want to pose in your accent but think in your brain and body.9

Introduction

5

This self-reflexive passage from Ondaatje’s Coming through Slaughter (1976) foregrounds the frustration of the narrator with the elusive figure of the text’s protagonist, real-life jazz musician Buddy Bolden. History’s verdict (“sentence”) on the New Orleans pioneer of jazz is delivered by Ondaatje in a seemingly factual fashion: there is nothing to be said (just a sentence) about Bolden other than the sensational story of his “going berserk” amidst a parade. Therefore, the task Ondaatje has set himself with Coming through Slaughter is to perform a violent undoing — a rereading — of the historical narrative that has relegated to the margins, if not excluded, the ineluctable presence of the supposedly mad black musician. The questions are directed at the unidentifiable “you” — Buddy, the reader, or even the text (from the reader’s point of view) — and they target the nature of representation in a manner not dissimilar to the injunction to the reader in the passage from Anil’s Ghost discussed previously to situate their reading. Here, it is the body and its senses — another embodied context reminiscent of the materiality of the filming camera in Anil’s Ghost — that have been placed in the limelight. A distanced and impartial record of the social, racial, linguistic, and demographic emplacement of Charles “Buddy” Bolden (1877–1931) will be an insufficient redemptive gesture on the narrator’s part. Such a representation will be too transparent, depriving Buddy of his singularity and opacity. The address to the “you,” at the same time, brings about intimacy; the simultaneous appeal to cognition and embodiment — to thinking in the other’s body and brain, rather than thinking about or as if being the other — has the potential to perform an inappropriate yet non-appropriative form of reading. It is not a mirror image that the narrator is looking for but, rather, the violent and physical dissolution of the boundaries between the “I” and the “you,” the substitution of the omniscient narrator external to the represented event with the fleshy one (of the tangible arm) who “spills forth” into character and reader. Such an embodied rendition of History resorts to the senses not to confirm empirical truths by objectifying the bodily and retaining rational distance but to affirm the opacity and intercorporeality of being and experience. It is in such non-appropriative encounters between self and other, signification and reality, body and discourse, that the ethics of an affect-driven narration is created. In this sense, I will be using the term “haptic” in this book to refer to a multisensory reading act that implicates touch but is not reduced to it, that involves the aesthetic without idealizing it, that is ethical without moralizing. In addition to the obvious links between the “haptic” and tactility, one needs to bear in mind the etymological association of the term with aesthetics, as well as the metaphorical extension of the meaning of “touch” to the semantic field of affect and emotion: to be touched means to be affected physically as well as emotionally.10 These semantic features undoubtedly remind one

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of the significance cultural thinkers have historically attributed to flesh and feeling in artistic invention — from the ancient Greek philosophy of catharsis through Enlightenment empiricism and Romantic synesthesia to modernist symbolism, postmodernist hyperesthesia, and postcolonial sensualism.11 More recent trends in cultural theory have also renewed their interest in the sensual and the affective along two different trajectories: on one hand, to unveil the “social ideologies conveyed through sensory values and practices”12 and thus deconstruct the assumed “naturalness” of bodily phenomena; on the other hand, to counter the textualization of the body in social constructivism by exploring the potential of a prediscursive “enfleshed” agency that is not reducible to social structures.13 If interest in the corporeal is not necessarily new, its reading and theorizing have largely proceeded in a predominantly desensualized textual fashion, as Michel Serres argues.14 A number of philosophical traditions have discussed the senses in terms of their primacy and autonomy, with sight attributed a privileged position and touch regarded as the basest, even if most foundational, of the sensory modalities. “Bound up with [its] object rather than [its] bodily location,”15 sight as “the noblest of the senses” has been postulated (in Western thought, starting with Plato and Aristotle) as a sense that is free to engender a reality of its own and capable of detaching itself from the physicality of the perceiving subject. In conjunction with these powers of the scopic to see its object into being and disembody the subject, vision and visibility have featured in psychological and anthropological discourses as central to the formation of the subject and even to the development of the human species. Touch, by contrast, has been conceptualized as a sense thriving on proximity, reciprocity, dispersal, and vulnerability. Unlike sight, it is the sense most frequently associated with the body, and for this reason was identified by Aristotle as both the most profound and the basest of all senses. Touch, not only as cutaneous experience but also as an overall feeling of one’s corporeality (visceral, proprioceptive, and kinesthetic), has been hailed as the sense most difficult to localize in a particular organ, isolate from the rest of the sensorium, or even contain within the boundaries of the self.16 Touch and corporeality have been invoked by both empiricist and Christian accounts with reference to the verifiability of truth through touch; in contrast to the objective thrust of these interpretations, modern psychology — from Sigmund Freud to Didier Anzieu — has sought to establish the significance of the body in the formation of the self. However, the boundaries between subjective “inside” and objective “outside” have been challenged by phenomenologically inflected interpretations that read fleshiness as irreducible to an essence, engaged in a constant exchange of affect with its “outside,” and conducive to an ethical sense of being in the world,17 whereas recent criticism in feminist, postcolonial, and

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queer studies has insisted on the deconstruction of the nature/culture binary, the firm emplacement of the somatic within specific regimes of knowledge production, as well as the analysis of corporeal agency to constitute and redefine existing systems of representation and meaning production.18 The long-standing debate about sensory superiority also triggered an ongoing dilemma about sensorial autonomy: To what extent are the different senses independent of one another? What correspondences can one detect in their functions and the kind of information they collect? To what extent does sensory specificity amount to absolute incommensurability?19 The accounts of ancient Greek philosophers and Enlightenment empiricists, as well as the studies of contemporary neuroscientists, psychologists, and phenomenologists, have recognized the interdependence of the sensory modalities, with the senses and sensorial information being given varying degrees of specificity, autonomy, and transferability.20 This “intersensoriality”21 of the different perceptual systems within the body — their “knots” and “intertwinings,” to invoke designations used by Serres and Maurice Merleau-Ponty — has been extended to discussions of the “intercorporeality” of embodied experience, intersubjective exchanges (of the experience and representation of the body) that have social, political, and ethical ramifications.22 Merleau-Ponty, for example, has identified a tangible aspect to vision and postulated a kind of reversibility between the two senses, something that feminist critic Luce Irigaray finds problematic insofar as a return to the scopic would reinforce the hegemony of the patriarchal order and its appropriative gaze.23 In a similar politically inspired attempt to deconstruct the hegemony of vision, Iris Young refuses to regard all kinds of seeing as instances of the male gaze: Thus we might conceive of a mode of vision, for example, that is less a gaze, distanced from and mastering its object, but an immersion in light and color. Sensing as touching is within, experiencing what touches it as ambiguous, continuous, but nevertheless differentiated.24

The multiplicity and motility germane to touch, also transferable to other perceptual modalities, have the potential to contest normative perceptions of the corporeal as a passive container of an emotional “inside” or a blank surface bearing the inscription of a social “outside.” When emplaced in a specific context, touch acquires political and ethical valence because it can facilitate encounters with difference within and without, without appropriating it into sameness. As Young argues, however, it is too universalizing to reduce vision to a rapacious male gaze, and it is thus conceptually, politically, and artistically unsatisfactory to do so. Visual practices in both life and art have tended to transgress the fixed construction defined by Renaissance theories of perspective:

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ancient Greek architecture was infused with a strong haptic sensibility that invited the viewer to appreciate the physical outline and engage with forms in a visceral way; Dutch painters focused on material objects and demanded a more participatory eye; Baroque art softened focus, multiplied perspectives, and blurred boundaries, and thus shattered the illusion of the fourth wall of representation; these tendencies were subsequently taken over by Impressionist loss of boundaries and Cubist rejection of single perspective. In the aesthetic domain, the “intersensoriality” of art was acknowledged by the art historian Aloïs Riegl who suggested using the term “haptic” to describe a different way of looking at art: instead of scanning the outline, haptic vision reads in depth, penetrates the surface and rejoices in texture and grain. His understanding of art returns to earlier definitions of the aesthetic proposed by Aristotle and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, which emphasized the involvement of the senses and emotions in the appreciation of beauty. Riegl drew a contrast between the optical and the haptic eye: whereas the former follows linearity and contour, the latter is a tactile eye and its way of seeing can be interpreted as a form of touching.25 The multisensory nature of the haptic has since been celebrated by a number of thinkers. Walter Benjamin discussed the loss of the aura in art to contemporary mechanical reproductions, as well as the tangibility of storytelling compared with the intangibility of the modern novel.26 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari conferred haptic qualities to the “smooth space” of deterritorialization, insofar as hapticity destabilizes the omnipotence of the disembodied Cartesian eye and brings experience back to the physical surface of the body.27 In his analyses of media as the extension of men and the power of or over men, Marshall McLuhan alluded to the multisensory nature of televisual experience as well as to the more intimate relationship between viewer and the televised event. He concluded that a more tactile experience of television can emancipate us from the verbal literacy imposed by the standardization, atomization, industrialization, and urbanization of modernity.28 In a similar vein, Juhani Pallasmaa called for a renewed appreciation of “the complexity, comprehensiveness and plasticity of the perceptual system” in architecture, something lost in the Western tradition of ocularcentrism in the arts.29 The more engaging and agentive qualities of the haptic (with respect to contemporary intercultural cinema) have been discussed by Laura Marks. Informed by phenomenological and postcolonial theory, Marks’s conceptualization of hapticity is influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s notion of sensorial reversibility, and Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Cartesian drive to blur the boundaries between subject and object: Optical visuality depends on separation between the viewing subject and the object. [. . .] Optical visuality [. . .] assumes that all the resources the viewer

Introduction

9

requires are available in the image. Accordingly, the optical image [. . .] affords the illusion of completeness that lends itself to narrative. [. . .] The ideal relationship between viewer and image in optical visuality tends to be that of mastery, in which the viewer isolates and comprehends the objects of vision.30

Optical visuality is premised on the presence of a gap between the seer and the seen, which is crucial for the ascertainment of difference between the two. Distance, furthermore, lends the viewer interpretive powers, insofar as the illusion of complete optical control over the space extends to the illusion of absolute knowledge of the optical image. In turn, the image (optical object) is construed as static and ahistorical, devoid of any form of agency, “voice,” or subjectivity; it is seen as being there, available for interpretation by the viewer. The optical subject’s assumed sense of “mastery” extends not only to their ownership of the discourse on the optical object but also to their “incorporeal awareness,”31 with all traces of the embodied nature of vision being erased. In contrast to opticity, the haptic tends to move over the surface of its object rather than to plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture. It is more inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze than to gaze. [. . .] The haptic image forces the viewer to contemplate the image itself instead of being pulled into narrative. [. . .] The ideal relationship between viewer and image in haptic visuality is one of mutuality, in which the viewer is more likely to lose herself in the image, to lose her sense of proportion. [. . .] Haptic visuality implies making oneself vulnerable to the image, reversing the relationship of mastery that characterises optical viewing.32

It follows, then, that the haptic observer approximates the contemplated entity by relinquishing their authority of perspective and definition, by being willing to experience the physicality of the observed one. This desire, however, is predicated on the subject’s avowal of their own materiality entering into an experiential domain shared with the contemplated entity. This requires the involvement of the beholder’s entire sensorium, not of an individual perceptual modality only. The perceiver, then, is able to experience the world in its simultaneity, overcoming the isolation, monoperspectivism, and fixity of opticity. Finally, what hapticity achieves is the subject’s relinquishment of mastery, which is then followed by the acquisition of embodied knowledge, shared with the contemplated entity. Subject and object come to inhabit a plane of exchange and mutuality; the subject/object distinction is blurred. The agency of the observed entity is not lost either; their inscrutable gaps and the shared materiality with the haptic observer empower the hitherto passive object. Furthermore, this agency

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is always imminent by virtue of the fact that the haptic observed always remains somewhat inscrutable and emanates new meaning(s) as they ward off absolute and conclusive interpretation, as they permit themselves to be “grazed” by, while at the same time actively grazing, the observer. Taking my cue from Alexis Tadié that “[t]o read is to see (through) the words,”33 my reading of the passage from Coming through Slaughter with which this section opened, as well as of the rest of Ondaatje’s oeuvre, has been informed by the haptic/optical dialectic outlined by Marks. On one hand, the act of reading can involve a purely optical survey of the words on the page — “seeing through” them as transparent vehicles of meaning, which relates to a recognizable reality out there or to the author’s subjectivity. On the other hand, the reading act can be “hapticized” into a multisensory, embodied, and emplaced engagement with a book — seeing the artifact, the author, and the reader as tangible and opaque entities, and being reminded that someone is there, biting his pen, scratching his ear [. . .] someone who, like us, grows tired, is not always in control of his movements, forgets, gets excited, gets bored. [. . .] And, as with all made objects [. . .] [the book] is put together out of bits and pieces, attached to each other by dint of hard work, skill, guile and sheer preservative instinct.34

In Coming through Slaughter, the narrator’s, as well as the reader’s, optical position is not hard to identify: not only is he the controlling voice who writes “a silent other” for the reader’s benefit, but the metafictional quality of the paragraph also focuses on his frustration with meaning-making. History in this scenario is an extension of the narrative voice insofar as its optical gaze has been quite eclectic in the memorialization process: Buddy Bolden and his uncomfortable disease do not constitute a worthy enough entry. This gap, therefore, shall be filled by the narrator, whose “knowing,” “pushing,” and “thinking” lend him agency of which Bolden — subsumed and passivized under the general “you” — is deprived. The presence of “the mirror” of representation is crucial: it will facilitate the identification of the narrator-cum-detective figure with the jazz musician, as well as that of the reader with the narrator. However, this initial reading is complicated by the emphasis on the narrator’s linguistic inability to talk about Buddy or even about his own frustration. The sparse vocabulary, unanswered questions, and uncertain syntax have a more direct impact in their conveying of frustration; in violating standard English syntax Ondaatje responds to the discursive violence of History against the forgotten jazz musician. These linguistic changes are further complemented by a conceptual close-up on the narrator’s body and his confession about relying on the senses to get to

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know the object of his investigation. In contrast to Romantic or exoticist accounts of otherness, however, sensory plenitude is absent from this passage; acknowledging his own inability to know or think like Buddy, Ondaatje’s narrator displays a cognitive vulnerability, which enables a more ethical encounter with otherness. At the same time, Ondaatje does not present this aesthetic act as a consolatory redemption; the narrator’s attack against his mirror image (or for that matter, against anyone — reader or writer — who “poses” as someone else) constitutes a violent undoing of History’s discursive violence. Meant to unsettle, this spillage through the “fourth wall” remains uncathartic in its avowed failure at identification or adequate representation. When it comes to the rest of Ondaatje’s oeuvre, my investigation of how his haptic aesthetics works in the narratives will unfold along two main trajectories. First, the mixed-media quality of the majority of his works — through the use of photographs in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems (1970), Coming through Slaughter, and Running in the Family (1982), drawings in The English Patient (1992) and The Story (2005), sonographs in Coming through Slaughter, maps in Running in the Family, and diagrams in Divisadero (2007) — calls for a multisensory, and inevitably tactile, engagement on the part of the reader, insofar as more than one sensory modality needs to be involved in the act of reading. Secondly, when the multisensory is not part of the material shape of the texts, the haptic experience is very much a major preoccupation. The body, its sensations and experiences, is at the core of Ondaatje’s themes and imagery:35 from the earlier “violent” works involving the murderous Billy the Kid in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and suicidal Buddy Bolden in Coming through Slaughter, through the visceral memorialization of pre-Independence Ceylon in Running in the Family, war-torn Sri Lanka in Anil’s Ghost, and televized warfare in Divisadero, to the ideologically motivated race, gender, and class inscriptions in In the Skin of a Lion (1987) and The English Patient. Although one may be tempted to interpret such literary close-ups of the bodily as sensationalist “tricks of the trade” or as an inadequate (and insensitive) metaphor for modernist alienation, my reading focuses instead on the importance of tactile interventions for the forging of Ondaatje’s particular brand of haptic aesthetics and its politico-ethical ramifications. For it is in the proximity among those involved in the art of creation — proximity signaled by the emphasis on the tactile and its intercorporeality — that the boundaries erected by optical knowledge, power, and veracity collapse. Crucial to both of the above points is the presence of the cinematographic in Ondaatje’s oeuvre. The writer himself has declared his lasting interest in the cinematic in a number of interviews, a fact to which his own films of the 1970s — Sons of Captain Poetry (1970), Carry on Crime and Punishment

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(1971), and The Clinton Special (1974) — testify.36 That Ondaatje’s narrative works — more overtly so but not limited to The Collected Works and Coming through Slaughter — share a number of formal characteristics with films has been the subject of an extensive critical discussion.37 What is more, the cinematographic resurfaces as a theme and metafictional commentary in the later texts as well: family photographs become alive as though on a reel in Running in the Family, John Boorman’s westerns are questioned for their veracity in Anil’s Ghost, and talkies facilitate the assimilation of Toronto immigrants in In the Skin of a Lion. I have extended this debate further by analyzing Ondaatje’s blend of genres, mediums, and ontological realities as an instance of his cinematic rendition of the haptic aesthetics informing his writing. In the epistemological uncertainty and vulnerability triggered by his creative splicing of the textual, visual, and tactile, a feeling of empathy and recognition can arise — an appreciation that is affective and affectionate, profoundly ethical and subtly political.

A Touch Affectionate but Troubling The potentially egalitarian nature of the haptic I have discussed earlier resounds with Gilles Deleuze’s definition of reading: There are [. . .] two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you’re even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on and on. Or there’s the other way: you see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is “Does it work, and how does it work?” How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through, you try another book. This second way of reading’s intensive: something comes through or it doesn’t. There’s nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. It’s like the plugging into an electric circuit [. . .] Writing is one flow among others, with no special place in relation to the others, that comes into relations of current, countercurrent, and eddy with other flows — flows of shit, sperm, words, action, eroticism, money, politics, and so on.38

Depriving art of its conventional definition as a supreme form of creation, Deleuze situates it on a par with other material and bodily flows, and removes it from the safe ensconcement of subjective interiority. Its reception depends on whether and how the work affects its audience; art, for

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Deleuze, is affective and experiential rather than signifying. Invoking the metaphor of the electric circuit, the French philosopher compares reading to an electric current and the reader to a plug, something reminiscent of Ondaatje’s character Gamini inviting Anil to become a writer by “hitting the circuit.” Obviously, in the latter statement the political charge against the culture industries of the West strips the circuit connecting reader to writer and book to external reality of the historical vacuum and political innocence in which they “flow” in Deleuze’s discussion. Nonetheless, the rejection of subjectivity and extra-textual referentiality advocated by Deleuze does not strip affect-driven art of its political potential. To start with, the Nietzschean emphasis on the body, on its flows and energies, contests readings of the corporeal as a hierarchically structured and static entity; art as a human activity, in this sense, cannot be interpreted merely as the product of a static and unitary self, or as the structured representation of a solid and organized reality. Rather, art acts and becomes, constantly producing and connecting to the movements of the bodies participating in it, and thus replacing notions of the aesthetic as a moralizing or idealizing judgment of life. And it is in such celebrations of the corporeal that revolutionary art emerges: “There are no revolutionaries but the joyful, and no politically or aesthetically revolutionary painting without delight.”39 As already mentioned, the link between the aesthetic and the bodily has been discussed as mediated by the affective — emotions and feelings. The semantics of “touching” might suggest that “to touch emotionally” is just a figurative extension of the primary literal meaning “to touch physically.” This shared etymology can also be discerned in the distrust with which Enlightenment philosophers treated both bodily sensations and emotional life, a trend perpetuated in Western thought through the juxtaposition of rationality and feelings. However, as neuroscientists, biologists, and psychologists have argued, drawing definitive boundaries between “emotions” and “physical sensations,” on the one hand, and “feelings” and “reason,” on the other, is questionable.40 While the forerunner of modern psychology, William James, concluded that the somatic manifestations of emotions are primary to their integration into consciousness — thus implying that affect-related sensations preceded cognition — later cognitive and behaviorist scientists preferred to give precedence to the workings of the brain over the soma (or at least its observable part).41 Affects were thus ascribed a secondary role, as adjuncts to an already cognitively processed sensory-motor activity. With the studies of psychologist Silvan Tomkins in the mid-twentieth century, a major reconsideration of the nature and role of affects took place. Tomkins “freed” affect of its cognitive and behaviorist shackles: it is not always conscious, and neither are there always behavioral adjustments to be

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observed.42 Precognitive and non-linguistic, affect was discussed as responsible for the body’s intelligent response to internal or external stimuli. Its complex and general nature makes it hard to locate on the body (the chemical and neural networks involved are numerous) or to exert control over (one cannot control the stimulus and rarely the affective response). The urgency of affects (e.g. in distress, fear, anger) helps manipulate one’s surroundings (or others) through feeling; however, affects themselves are not the end result or the motive, but amplifiers facilitating the speedier gratification of a need or desire.43 At the same time, affects are less teleological and freer in their workings than desires (or what psychoanalysis calls “drives”): they “can be, and are, attached to things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions, and any number of other things, including other affects.”44 Emotions and feelings do not originate solely from the subject neither are they “owned” by the individual psyche; they can be “imposed” from without.45 And last but not least, affect is “synesthetic, implying a participation of the senses in each other.”46 As John Protevi concludes, the threefold definition of “sense” as sensibility, signification, and action (direction) encapsulates the mutual imbrications of the affective, cognitive, and sensory-motor.47 This in-betweenness of the affective — between perception and consciousness, stimulus and response, biology and psychology — is what makes affects flexible and mobile,48 and their intersubjective potential has paved the way for the development of a relational ontology of the body and the self. Spinoza’s and Simondon’s ethological accounts of affect define it as the capacity to affect and be affected by other bodies — rather than as a subjective emotion owned by an individual subjectivity;49 and this, in its turn, has called for a reconceptualization of the body: no longer is it an object sealed off from its environment, or yearning to cohere with the normative “body image.” On the contrary, body and self are regarded as unbounded and permeable entities, temporary coagulations of constantly moving material, social, and psychical energies. The transgression of subjective boundaries, in this case, will not necessarily result in the trauma of punctured wholeness; instead, trauma becomes an experience of “inviting openness and difference in repetition, rather than setting off a desiring economy around the lack of containment.”50 Its resistance to subjective ownership and unavailability to cognition make the affective a partial and plural experience to which “non-knowing” and “non-representation” are central.51 Discussing the representation of affect along these lines, therefore, “invites us to forsake the comforts of our reading habits, scriptural routines and the other familiarities of visual culture,”52 and revisit Deleuze’s conceptualization of art as an assemblage of multiple non-signifying and material flows. Affect-driven art, therefore, will not encourage personal identification or subjective ownership by the

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reader/viewer, but their openness to otherness.53 What matters is not what art says but what it does and how it does it; what matters is not recognition and emotional cathartic release, but the awakening of critical thought and a sense of unsettlement. This draws some connections between the aesthetic renditions of affect and trauma, insofar as in both cases their representation entails a cognitive arrest of something unavailable to consciousness or the sublimation of an intensive experience whose truthfulness might be lost. Jill Bennett has highlighted another intersection of affect and trauma: The experience of trauma paradigmatically encapsulates both direct, unmediated affective experience and an absence of affect, insofar as it is resistant to cognitive processing and induces “psychic numbing.”54

The excessive aspects of trauma pose challenges to artistic — or for that matter cognitive — mediation, similar to affect’s dispersed pre-discursive, psycho-somatic, and intersubjective nature. Just as the uncontainable affective states threaten the coherence of the subject, traumatic experiences risk the dissolution of the self. In this sense, Bennett suggests affective representation of trauma merits attention as it is characterized by immediacy, lack of mediation and cognition. The ambivalence inherent to affect — as an amplifier that facilitates the survival of the self through the gratification of desires but also as an experience whose intersubjectivity can blur the boundaries of the contained self — is pertinent to trauma as well: as an affectively intense experience which resists integration into consciousness, trauma equally provokes emotional insensitivity. When it comes to the representation of an extreme affective experience such as trauma, a major preoccupation of critics has been its potential aestheticization. On the one hand, representing the dissolution of the subject by a traumatic experience can be conducive to ethical reconsiderations of the self as open to alterity and respectful of its opacity. On the other hand, however, a process of desubjectification through artistic representation can also leave the actual trauma victim open to indiscriminate appropriations insofar as mediation (literary, artistic, historical, etc.) risks “translating” extreme pain and suffering into palatable cultural products or trite historical truisms. The seamless identification of those consuming art and history with those undergoing a traumatic experience has been questioned by historians and critics alike; Elaine Scarry, for example, alerts to the frequent exemption of art from any moral responsibility: Is it not peculiar that the very thing being deconstructed — creation — does not in its intact form have a moral claim on us as high as the others’ is low, that the

16

Michael Ondaatje action of creating is not [. . .] held to be bound up with justice in the way that those other events [torture and war] are bound up with injustice, that it [. . .] is not held to be centrally entailed in the elimination of pain as the unmaking of the world is held to be entailed in pain’s infliction?55

The act of creation sublimates pain and suffering into a work of art, thus setting up a distance between the originary contact with the body and the transfer of this experience into a remote “neutral” object. In this somewhat cleansing process artistic creation appears to be absolved from any ethical relationship with the world or with the body it has undertaken to represent, apart from questions of aesthetic execution and fidelity to the object of representation. This is where critical disillusionment with the redemptive functions of art lies: sublimation in mimetic representations may result in aesthetic idealization and catharsis, but they also dismiss and annihilate real-life experiences. Claims for the high morality of art may conceal a deep horror of life. And yet nothing perhaps is more frivolous than that horror, since it carries within it the conviction that, because of the achievements of culture, the disasters of history somehow don’t matter. Everything can be made up, can be made over again, and the absolute singularity of human experience — the source of both its tragedy and its beauty — is thus dissipated in the trivializing nobility of a redemption through art.56

In such conceptualization of art as a higher truth and authority than historical experience, Bersani argues, an inverted Platonic hierarchy is instituted between the image and the model, which reverses but does not subvert the tradition of separating art from reality, or the practice of valorizing one over the other. Is art then capable of acting as a disturbing reminder of inassimilable events rather than as a cathartic amnesia of a disturbing past? One way to avoid aesthetic appropriation of affect through identification has put forward by Dominick LaCapra. He has argued that art should invite “empathic unsettlement” by relying on the reader’s/viewer’s affective response to another but also recognizing the differences between them.57 This formulation is premised on the intersubjective power of affect to move and be moved, and thus transcend the boundaries of the self and encounter difference. The encounter, however, is not followed by a return to sameness through crude identification — recognizing oneself in the other and thus sympathize with them — but by the ethical recognition of the opacity and unassimilability of alterity. The alienating (“unsettling”) effect of such empathic encounters, as Jill Bennett has commented, is vital for the production of new ways of thinking and perceiving.58 If the ethics of affective aesthetics lies in its

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ability to evoke empathy in the perceiver and destabilize the boundaries between self and other, its political momentum emerges in the awakening of non-identitarian thinking, which defines vulnerability positively and regards openness to difference as constitutive of the self. Central to this affect-induced thought is the role of the corporeal insofar as it registers the experience of suffering and pain prior to their conscious integration (as sympathy or identification).59 In this conceptualization, what matters is not the “what” or the content of representation, but the “how,” its medium; in line with Deleuze’s discussion, it is not the recognition of an external reality that should motivate the appreciation of a creative act, but its ability to affect and relate to objects, bodies, material flows. A second issue to be considered in the representation of extreme affective states such as trauma is the “resistant textuality” of their rendition.60 Informed by the withholding of cognition and the recognition of difference, the act of bearing witness to a traumatic event attempts to adhere to the truth of the event and the truth of its incomprehensibility. Slipping away from epistemological frames of reference and being uncontainable within conventional cognitive and linguistic structures, testimonial accounts beget a different truth and a processual language in an attempt to convey an incomprehensible, unrepresentable and irreducible event. Attempting to access an irretrievable reality, a witness, Shoshana Felman and Cathy Caruth point out, creatively rediscovers the testimonial power of language.61 Bearing witness, thus, not only confirms the impossibility of an all-inclusive meta-narrative, but also restores the truth of creative becoming, opacity and proximity; according to Marianne Hirsch, it invokes both “the act of holding — caring, protective, and nurturing” and the “historical withholding that does not absorb the other.”62 Materiality and proximity are crucial for the act of witnessing and its transmission through language. The invoked opacity is both “responsive and responsible for the other,”63 preserving and acknowledging alterity and the unbridgeable gap between the “here and now” of the testimony and the “there and then” of the distant event. Instead of supplementing the already available knowledge, however, the tangible (in reality and in representation) becomes an uneasy witness to the impossibility of narrating incommensurable languages and experiences, and an unsettling trace of proximity that disrupts dominant discourses. To the extent that the haptic aesthetics discussed in the previous section is part of a tactile epistemology, it also resists the transparencies of absolute knowledge and ultimate truth, and relishes, instead, the proximal unknowability of difference: At the same time that it acknowledges that it cannot know the other, haptic visuality attempts to bring it close, in a look that is so intensely involved with

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Michael Ondaatje the presence of the other that it cannot take the step back to discern difference, say, to distinguish figure and ground.64

While the haptic “points to the limits of sensory knowledge” of the observer,65 it does not secure a plenitude of sensory experience to achieve full knowledge either; rather, it encourages yielding to the inscrutability of what is being observed. If testimony performs a creative process by exploring and traversing the wounds — physical and textual — inflicted by History and language, vulnerability is given a positive reassessment as a site from where the inexpressible and incomprehensible experience of witnessing can be approached. Similarly, the body, as the site of wound infliction and testimony production, is affirmatively acknowledged precisely for its ability to “break through” the semantic domain. The haptic encounter, then, will not violate the vulnerability of corporeality and woundedness by appropriating them in an optical discourse; on the contrary, the intimate engagement will offer solace not a solution, a caress not an exposure. Questioning the omniscience of opticity, haptic writing invokes a sense of paradox by combining different sense modalities, by approaching and yet preserving difference, by affirming its own adequacy and yet acknowledging its own insufficiency. Ondaatje’s works can be analyzed as instances of witness writing on a number of levels. On the one hand, the semi-documentary and metafictional nature of his texts, the overlaps between truth, fiction, and history, and the allusions to the generic conventions of the detective story address the question of how one can bear witness to reality, to history, to artistic creation. Moreover, the mixed-media quality of his books, including or referencing ledgers, atlases, maps, plaques, photographs, tapes, reels, letters, drawings, and interviews with witnesses, lends the textual artifacts the tangibility of haptic writing, whose materiality critically gestures at historical silences and the impossibility of obliterating these silences. Since Ondaatje’s declared objective is to engage with unhistoricized lives,66 his books indefatigably carry out excavations in an attempt to witness belatedly unhistoricized events and unhistoricized testimonies of others.67 However, this witness writing shies away from becoming another retrospective narrative of the past; recognizing the impossibility of a redemptive testimonial account, Ondaatje’s texts relentlessly expose the violence of optical incursions and the inaccessibility of experience to transparent forms of representation. On the other hand, these works repeatedly stage Ondaatje’s self-conscious bearing witness to his own (witness) writing.68 Such acts of self-reflective witnessing explore the complexities of getting at “the truth”: Ondaatje’s witness writing opts for affiliation, proximity, and multiplicity, and repeatedly foregrounds its limitations to convey authenticity and its precarious implication in the very episteme it critiques.

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Denouncing the optical nature of mainstream historical and literary discourses which obliterates the opacity and multiplicity of being, the following passage from Running in the Family revisits the validity of intimacy and affection for the historicization process: Truth disappears with history and gossip tells in the end nothing of personal relationships. [. . .] [N]othing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew in the shade of each other’s presence. No one speaks of that exchange of gift and character — the way a person took on and recognized in himself the smile of a lover. Individuals are seen only in the context of these swirling social tides.69

The sweep of History threatens to drown the private and the personal into extinction; adhering to its optical conventions, individuals are reduced to “footnotes.”70 Exotic tales of feuds, vendettas, and elopements — gossip material for popular (optical) representations of the region and its upper classes — are, after all, about conflicts of appropriation and domination. What is missing, according to Ondaatje, is the literary expression of the “closeness” and “exchange” between self and other, relationships that stand for reciprocity and affection. The caress of intimacy cannot be contained in political doctrines nor can it be reproduced through optical means of representation; Ondaatje’s “truthfulness” to privacy is enacted through his affectionate but non-intrusive engagement with the lost histories of interpersonal intimacy. Similar to Gamini’s impassioned outburst against Western detached didacticism in Anil’s Ghost and the narrator’s desire in Coming through Slaughter to “think in” Buddy Bolden’s body, cognition and affect are not juxtaposed but conjoined, and the adequate literary expression of their amplified effect emphasizes the presence of the body. On one level, this is achieved through Ondaatje’s attack on the supremacy of verbal language. In the following episode, intimacy is recuperated by a zoom-in on the last moments of Mervyn Ondaatje’s life via his friend Archer’s uneventful narrative: Two days before he died we were together. We were alone in the house. [. . .] You know it is a most relaxed thing when you sit with a best friend and you know there is nothing you have to tell him, to empty your mind. We just stayed there together, silent in the dusk like this, and we were quite happy.71

In contrast to Ondaatje’s father’s adventurous life and extravagant attitudes that the memoir has hitherto constructed, this episode focuses on the tacit joy of being together. From a negatively defined concept, i.e. “being unable to speak” or “being forbidden to speak,” which resounds with ideas of

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impotence and subservience, silence here conveys a sense of intimacy and mutual understanding. Archer reflects upon the suspension of cognition that this moment of togetherness has brought about; and even though the happiness experienced is shared, he recognizes Mervyn’s difference by relinquishing interpretive authority over his friend’s thoughts. The narrator Archer has no clear recollection of what or whether anything was said at that moment; the comfortable intimacy in which the two friends spent their last moments together has been grasped affectively (“we were quite happy”) and perceptively (“relaxed thing,” “silent in the dusk”). Even though relatively uneventful, this account draws attention to Archer’s awakening to the affective charge of a moment, to its intersubjective and multisensory nature. At the same time, recognizing the opacity of difference and its epistemological vulnerability, this passage gestures towards the ethical and political ramifications of Ondaatje’s agenda. Drawing a parallel between the impossibility of getting through Mervyn’s opacity and of bearing witness to postcolonial Sri Lanka, Ondaatje is aware of his karapotha status — “I am the foreigner. I am the prodigal who hates the foreigner”72 — his ambiguous position between the intimate exchange and distanced optical representation. It is through this ability to draw close and pull back, and the acknowledgement of vulnerability and openness to otherness, that Ondaatje redefines the roles and responsibilities of representation and its interpretation. Further to exposing the inadequacy of verbal language as a tool of optical representation, he also presents the disturbing incompleteness of tactile epistemology as more enabling and profoundly ethical. Ondaatje’s brand of witness writing defies the clear-cut prescriptions of optical representation by renouncing both unitary self and realist accounts. Such writing does not and cannot aesthetically represent a recognizable external referential reality; instead, it is conducive to continual recreation through the caress of tactility, the affect of songs, the timbre of skeletons and statues. At the same time, engendering anxiety rather than relief, the intimate scope of such writing does not redeem History through art; instead, by unsettling the fundamentals of optical transparency and absolute knowledge, unitary self and universal truth, the haptic text as witness writing exposes historical obliterations and atrocities. It restores intimacy and corporeality as viable approaches to bearing witness to personal and communal histories, and as ethical ways of preserving the opacity of difference.

Michael Ondaatje: Writing Politically with a Difference The sections so far have consistently led to the conclusion that an aesthetics premised on a reconceptualization of the bodily, its sensations and emotions,

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harbors the potential of deconstructing hegemonic (optical) notions of the self as unitary and contained, negatively defined against an other and teleologically driven towards absolute knowledge and control of their environs. As a more inclusive and responsive aesthetico-political approach to the body, writing and reading, the haptic exposes the ambivalences of hegemonic power and lends political agency through a revised understanding of the meaning and potential of the corporeal, the intimate, and the affectionate.73 While the mutual imbrications of the body and the political have been within the purview of critical discussions about hegemonic practices of control and strategies of subversion,74 the potential of affect to shape a more dynamic understanding of self and biology,75 and thus help us “rethink postmodern power after ideology”76 has drawn critical attention only recently.77 At the same time, however, Claude Gandelman points at the (ab)use of hapticity in ideological discourse — reiterating Benjamin’s critique of the aestheticization of politics — whereby the haptic has been read (primarily by Marxist critics) as a hazy, blurred, and aestheticized mystification of reality, sacrificing the clear political line (read optical).78 Likewise, Ernst Gombrich warns of the potential danger of appropriating the haptic for compromised historicist discourses,79 whereas Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard doubt the emancipatory project underlying recent developments in affect theory given cultural theorists turning a blind eye to the regulatory function of affects that neuroscientists and psychologists highlight in their research.80 Theorists of modernity such as Adorno and Lyotard have also questioned the role of affect in their notion of negative aesthetics — “anesthetics” — which captures the alienation and sensorial numbness permeating life.81 Along similar lines but contrary to verdicts of postmodern experience as affectless, David Howes has analyzed the hypersensuality of contemporary life as the “sensual logic of late capitalism,” concluding that it is exactly through intense sensory gratification (“hyperesthesia”) that consumers are seduced into “self-fulfillment, impulse buying and conspicuous consumption.”82 In a (post)colonial context of globalization, Sara Ahmed has highlighted the ambivalence of proximity as an encounter (colonial as well as contemporary) with “strangers” that has translated them into the abstraction of otherness; she thus calls for the necessity to rethink “the different modes of proximity we may have to strangers in contemporary contexts” and “ask how contemporary modes of proximity reopen prior histories of encounter.”83 The above discussions tread the ambivalent divide between reality and representation, ideology and reality, contesting the traditional Marxist definition of ideology as “false consciousness.” As Slavoj Žižek concludes ideological conviction is an indelible and fundamental part of social life:

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Michael Ondaatje If our concept of ideology remains the classic one in which the illusion is located in knowledge, then today’s society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being [sic] post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way — one of many ways — to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.84

Žižek emphasizes that the rift between ideology as theoretical knowledge or mystifying practices and reality is inadequate; rather, ideological discourse — along Althusserian lines — is a lived (conscious and unconscious, cognitive, affective, and material) reality, and to regard certain individuals as immune to its power is equivalent to post-ideological cynicism. In this sense, the modern enlightened subject should not celebrate themselves as post-ideological, as impervious to the ideological illusion; the real deception, on the contrary, is exactly this belief that ideology is distanced from social reality.85 Žižek’s excursus contests the boundaries of reality and ideology, the sensate, the affective, and the cognitive; and this poses some questions about the ideological premises of another mediated discourse — that of art. Similar to the detached cynicism of allegedly non-doctrinaire discourse, traditional conceptualizations of art have been fraught with the Platonic–Kantian attempt to distance the aesthetic (the beautiful, the non-mercenary) from the material — both as physical and as economic domain. Thus, the denigration of the corporeal in moral/ethical terms and the exemption of the artistic/ aesthetic from any moral/ethical claims underpin metaphysical definitions of the aesthetic, against which empiricists, Marxists, and deconstructionists, alike, rebel.86 The ambivalence of art therefore comes to the fore: simultaneously a propeller and deterrent to subversive action, art can have a political effect as long as it maintains both the proximity to and distance from the artistic object, thus preventing sublimation and catharsis. On the one hand, the transcendentalization of representation institutes distance between the subject and object of the work of art, a kind of demarcation that facilitates the atomization of the subject and the instrumentalization of the aesthetic. On the other hand, the obliteration of this distance results in the sense of control over the artistic object and the possibility for its absolute incorporation in the creative act. Thus, it is through the oscillation between proximity and distance, through the simultaneity of opacity and transparency, through the retreat to scarcity and embrace of corporeality, that a politically viable

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form of art — an embodied politics — can be forged which is not redemptive, cathartic, or transcendent, which is aware of and accountable for its own ideological complicities. Along these lines, the micropolitics advocated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, building upon Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopower,” can serve as a relevant conceptual framework that seeks to link creativity to political potential: When a minority creates models for itself, it’s because it wants to become a majority, and probably has to, to survive or prosper (to have a state, be recognized, establish its rights, for example). But its power comes from what it’s managed to create, which to some extent goes into the model, but doesn’t depend on it. A people is always a creative minority, and remains one even when it requires a majority [. . .] It’s the greatest artists (rather than popular artists) who invoke a people and find they “lack a people” [. . .] Artists can only invoke a people, their need for one goes to the very heart of what they’re doing, it’s not their job to create one, and they can’t. Art is resistance.87

Deleuze’s belief in the possibility of political and artistic praxes that fly in the face of avant-garde laments about “the eternal impossibility of the revolution” or liberal fears of “the fascist return of the war machine”88 reverberates with his definition of micropolitics as a creative and life-affirming intervention that cannot be contained by the identitarian strands of conventional (macro) politics. Rejoicing in liminality, sobriety, and difference, the micropolitics of affect and the art of becoming-minor do not abide by the principles of analogy and sameness but by those of ethology and difference. As Nicholas Thoburn concludes, this aesthetico-political project — cutting across and deviating from the rigid binaries informing identity and representation — is both transformative of and responsive to reality.89 Deleuze’s assertion that it is the cramped and deprived conditions of the social margins from which the creative impulses of the micropolitical emerge calls not so much for the romantic celebration of poverty, but for a re-imagining of what it means to be political in a climate of disillusionment with available ideologemes.90 Originating from the quarters of the disenfranchized without being bitter, responding to specific material realities and being able to find affinities across spatial and temporal borders, being intimate yet inclusive, micropolitics is no longer “a process of facilitating or bolstering identity [. . .] but [. . .] a process of innovation, experimentation, and of the complication of life.”91 Reminiscent of Deleuze’s critique of dogmatic idea of thought,92 the micropolitics of becoming is relational rather than representational — it engages with the multiple social forces (“lines of flight” as well as “molar lines”)

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traversing the cramped spaces of those defined as minorities; likewise, minor art is inevitably an engagement with an outside rather than an imposition of an identity or style. While Deleuze and Guattari have earned themselves ardent supporters among theorists of postmodernity, globalization, and capitalism, they have met with stringent criticisms from Marxist, deconstructionist, and postcolonial quarters alike.93 The charges tend to address the purported ahistoricity and universality of their philosophy, the playful self-indulgence and lack of applicability of their thought, as well as the privileged and mainstream interests that their theoretical postulates cater to. Caren Kaplan, for example, dismisses the notion of becoming-minor as “ahistorical modernist aesthetics and Eurocentric cultural appropriations”94 for its overestimation of its power to deconstruct hegemonic narratives, lack of politics of location, and perpetuation of mystification and dehistoricization. In her understanding, supported by Julie Wuthnow, Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualizations not only do not empower disenfranchized subjects or communities, but actually reinforce colonizing and imperializing practices and discourses.95 Likewise, Christopher Miller brands nomadology as idealistic and abstract post-identitarianism, and accuses the philosophers of anthropological exoticization of non-European realities, essentialist superficiality, and theoretical tourism.96 Following Alain Badiou’s critique, Slavoj Žižek suggests that the emphasis on singularity, affects, and vitalism in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “politics of passion” reverberates with the fascists’ appeal (in traditional Marxist terms) to people’s base irrational instincts.97 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, on the other hand, launch a more nuanced critique, theorizing the newly emerging order of (neocolonial) Empire as a version of “nomadism” similar to the diffuse control exercised by global capitalism and the world market.98 Not unlike Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri also perceive the limited subversive potential of the politics of difference and exclusionary identitarianism.99 In a similar vein, the Deleuze-inspired “thought of errantry” of Édouard Glissant’s writings100 — a positively defined quest for (rather than a conquest of) the other — challenges the conventional binaries of identitarianism with its emphasis on linguistic multiplicity, cultural contact, generic subversion, and stylistic contamination in the postcolonial context of the Antilles. For all its postmodernist features, his poetics of Relation is not apolitical, anti-identitarian, or ahistorical: it is not “inconsistent with the will to identity, which is, after all, nothing other than the search for a freedom within particular surroundings.”101 When it comes to gender politics, Rosi Braidotti perceives nomadicity as a type of critical consciousness that subverts conventions through the potency “of imagination, of myth-making, as a way to step out of the political and

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intellectual stasis of these postmodern times,” as a viable epistemological tool in feminist activism.102 Thus, creative traversals do not turn into the epitome of social escapism and ahistoricity, but forge a critical awareness which is not premised upon monolithic assumptions. Leaving room for revisions, such a creative politics of becoming destabilizes a priori constructs and allows for the process of reaching across to the other that Glissant advocates. In this way, the specificity of the immediate context is not dismissed in favor of a universal human subject: becoming a polyglot in one’s own tongue — an idea suggested by Braidotti, echoing Glissant — enables one to apply this openness to diversity to their particular circumstances and thus undermine exclusive and homogeneous notions of self (same) and other (different). Not only, then, are binaries proved restrictive, but a process of continual becoming is put forward as a more viable and inclusive alternative to identitarian being. What transpires from the above critiques reflects the tension between different conceptualizations of the political and the aesthetic that Isobel Armstrong compares. Summing up the paradoxical nature of the “fear of aesthetics” in the history of philosophy and literary theory, Armstrong suggests that this fear has been dictated either by an anxiety about the aesthetic as expressive of the unitary self and the law of the One, or by an anxiety about the aesthetic as “the collapse and elision of categories, as a permeable, dissolving meltdown of difference in the law of the same.”103 On the one hand, there is the necessity for boundary transgression and loss of demarcation invoked by advocates of postmodernist pastiche and intertextuality, postcolonial in-betweenness and migration, and deconstructionist revision of binaries. On the other hand, however, there is the critical camp insisting on the stringent demarcation between reality and representation, on the necessity for transparent language and clear-cut political allegiance. How does Ondaatje feature in the debates around the politics of art and its ideological complicity? Responses to his oeuvre have been quite varied, ranging from a celebration of the mythological scope and aesthetic virtuosity of his prose and poetry to vitriolic attacks on his dubious politics. Douglas Barbour, for instance, discerns a trend towards “novelization” in Ondaatje’s narrative works, which is symptomatic of gradual politicization;104 for Nell Waldman and Sam Solecki, on the other hand, it is exactly the tenuous political motivation and the resistance to ideological affiliation that inform the more compelling and engaging quality of Ondaatje’s earlier works.105 The proverbial Ondaatjean transgressions of generic norms have been discussed as aesthetico-political tools violating from within “[t]he porcupine of ego. The porcupine of the Safeway novel. The porcupine of English-Canadian self-righteousness,”106 or deconstructing ossified notions of identitarianism

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incongruous with contemporary postmodern realities.107 Readings, inflected by postcolonial critique, also situate Ondaatje’s aesthetics in the context of his complex positioning in-between the critique of Eurocentric discourses on modernity and subjectivity, and the contestation of ethnocentric thought and religious fundamentalism.108 Others, however, have been more skeptical and even dismissive of the possibility of political import in Ondaatje’s work. His postmodern parody is seen as foreclosing the radical politicization of literature through romantic escapism, modernist solipsism, and universal humanism.109 Frank Davey attributes this trend in Ondaatje’s oeuvre to a general tendency in Canadian writing towards obfuscating harsh political and social realities;110 whereas Arun Mukherjee and Chelva Kanaganayakam castigate the dilution of the national in his works as a result of the Westernization and commodification of the Sri Lankan-turned-Canadian author.111 Rather than choosing one of the sides in this critical discussion — apolitical, mainstream entertainment Ondaatje vs. a more politically conscious later Ondaatje — I also engage with the redefinition of the meaning of “writing politically.” I argue that similarly to Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of institutionalized political praxes, Ondaatje’s works contest the violence of both dominant and oppositional monologic discourses. Obliterating difference into reductive and identitarian binarisms, both majority and minority writings are prone to impose essentialism and sameness. In contrast, the haptic emphasis on the irreducibility and uncontainment of corporeality highlights a site where multiple allegiances can gain recognition without being subsumed into a uniform stance. If haptic aesthetics detours hegemonic forms of representation by transgressing binary structures, these seemingly liberatory strategies also run the risk of flying into quasi-humanist universalizations, exoticist essentialisms, or crude sensationalisms. As Patrick, the protagonist in In the Skin of a Lion, concludes while contemplating the emaciated bodies of the tannery workers, the aesthetics of the body can be compromised into becoming a vacuous aesthetically pleasing and historically deconstextualized celebration: If he were an artist he would have painted them but that was false celebration. What did it mean in the end to look aesthetically plumaged on this October day in the east end of the city five hundred yards away from Front Street? What would the painting tell?112

Although camerawork and paintbrush are incapable of capturing the physical supplement to the workers’ personal histories, the foregrounding of their corporeal vulnerability can also result in the brutalization of these individuals into one abject mass. Such paradoxical betrayals of the micropolitical

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are reflected in the ambiguous role of artistic practices in Ondaatje’s texts: cinema and theater, fine art and radio, become the agents of macropolitical assimilation (becoming Canadian), as well as the arena of personal subversive acts (Patrick’s revenge for Alice’s death). Despite this problematic deadlock between identitarian politics and unqualified embrace of the corporeal, all of Ondaatje’s texts leave a possibility for the emergence of an embedded and embodied micropolitical art of unsettlement. The collage of encounters — of characters, author figure, and reader — that Ondaatje’s suggestive endings present is simultaneously fraught with scars and wounds: bearing traces of excisions, they also hold the hope of being-togetherness. This book discusses in detail eight works by Michael Ondaatje, grouped in four chapters. Chapter 1, “Haptic Writing as Affective Cinema” discusses the role of the haptic in Ondaatje’s earlier narratives — The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Coming through Slaughter — as well as his films of the 1970s — Sons of Captain Poetry, Carry on Crime and Punishment, and The Clinton Special. While Ondaatje’s early texts have been criticized for their solipsist nature, their haptic qualities not only cherish the opacity of being, but they also enable micro-revisions of mainstream representations and official History. Moreover, both literary narratives and films, by virtue of their self-reflexivity, open structure, and processual nature, describe and demand the active engagement of their audiences in the creative act — a gesture that has obvious political implications. Chapter 2, “Haptic Aesthetics and Witness Writing,” focuses on Ondaatje’s Sri Lankan texts — Running in the Family and Anil’s Ghost. It discusses the haptic as enabling a more ethical form of witness writing, which engages intimately with the witnessed events and people without being intrusive or appropriative. While maintaining the emphasis on opacity present in the earlier works, Ondaatje’s Sri Lankan texts have the added dimensions of the author’s filiative testimonial function. The chapter argues that Running in the Family and Anil’s Ghost enact a form of haptic witness writing on two levels: first, because of Ondaatje’s proximity to the setting and characters through his descent, physical presence in the country, and emotional affinity; and second, because of the intimacy entailed in the process of “witnessing the witness” or “witnessing oneself witness” that these works perform. Chapter 3, “Haptic Writing and Micropolitical Betrayals,” discusses in detail the micropolitical workings of haptic aesthetics by analyzing Ondaatje’s most politically committed novels In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, and Anthony Minghella’s 1996 adaptation of The English Patient. The haptic betrays official historiography and normative representation through its emphasis on the bodily — brutalized and alienated during the progress of industrialization, abused by the advance of the nation-state.

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Enabling the multiple reimaginings of alternative futures, the hapticization of History demonstrates the inevitable politicization of the intimate and affective, while simultaneously with that contesting “the tyranny of reason,” the hegemony of macropolitics, the viability of conventional modes of representation and cultural expression. Chapter 3 thus discusses the workings of the haptic within and beyond the aesthetic domain as “micropolitical”: redefining the parameters of cognition and representation, the effects it brings about in the public, political domain are felt at the individual and supra-individual level. The normative crisis in epistemology and historiography brought about by the haptic is a running theme through the rest of the book; further to this, Chapter 3 investigates the tensions between the micropolitical potential of the haptic and its potential to be reappropriated by macropolitical and identitarian discourses. In this sense, while there is a danger in romanticizing the multisensory, affective, and intimate as sufficiently empowering micropolitical strategies — an argument that goes back to criticisms of phenomenology as a historically decontextualized discourse, or of the aesthetic as an autonomous depoliticized domain — I argue that Ondaatje’s works openly stage their own limitations and complicities. And rather than debunking this admission as a self-defeating gesture that blunts the radicalism of aesthetics, I regard it as a necessary “balancing act” that resists being reduced to political dogmatism. The Epilogue, “The Haptic in Literature: Hiding, Playing, Educating,” discusses Ondaatje’s latest publications — the novel Divisadero and poem The Story — in order to sum up the main argument concerning the nature of Ondaatje’s haptic aesthetics: intimate and multisensory, open and processual, affective and inclusive, transgressive and complicit. Inviting the reader to partake of the creative act, Ondaatje’s haptic writing enacts a seductive game of poker: like Coop’s double-duke play in Divisadero, the “crimps” placed in the riffle-stacked deck that the text has become enable the reader to follow different trajectories and end up with a variety of hands. Freed from the constraints of conventional modes of representation, Ondaatje’s haptic writing reaches out for an engaged and participatory reader; an assemblage of reality and representation, intimacy and affect, politics and creativity, it can be mobilized for political purposes without being didactic or dogmatic (the newly illustrated edition of The Story, for example, is part of a public literacy outreach project). The affective materiality of this aesthetics and its traversals by ideology can be productive for future debates beyond the field of literature — discussions in which the imbrications of the aesthetic and the material, the intimate and the political, the sensate and the cognitive, need to be acknowledged; conversations in which haptic aesthetics needs to be seen as a viable mode of micropolitical writing.

Chapter 1

Haptic Writing as Affective Cinema

Hence the power of cinema to offer a way of speaking not about, but nearby, its object; a power of approaching its object with only the desire to caress it, not to lay it bare. LAURA MARKS1

Cinema’s ability to reproduce movement and multiple perspectives, to reconstruct unseen events and invisible thoughts, and to work by the power of suggestion reflects a lasting desire to capture the flux and mutability of life. Gilles Deleuze, however, has argued that one can read the cinematic in two different ways: as a reproduction of a cause-and-effect driven world, in which people act within the sensory-motor schema of affect-action-reaction, in other words, movement-images; and, as a reflection on a world of falsifying narratives, in which reality and dreams, past and present, actuality and virtuality co-exist, in other words, time-images.2 In Deleuze’s conceptualization of the time-image, uncertainty and the absence of causality become creative vectors of becoming; they revive faith in a world that is not governed by the laws of the industrial assembly line. The cinematic, therefore, is seen by him as not merely an illusory replica of reality, but a concrete and processual world in its own right; representation is constitutive, rather than simply reflective, of reality. Along these lines of thought, cinema critic Laura Marks has also suggested that the stripping of causality and instrumental value from the image results in the spectator’s renewed interest in the perceptual process and in the indexical power of film: the latter bears traces of material objects, experiences, and people, and can thus act as a witness to tangible lives (as opposed to abstract metaphors). A crucial role in this conceptual framework is played by the tactile, which informs the otherwise distant relationship between film, image, and viewer. The investment of the aural and visual dimensions of film with tactile qualities lends the cinematic experience a haptic aspect that enables an intersubjective relationship between image and viewer, whereby the latter renounces traditional Cartesian notions of optical control for the vulnerability of embodied perception. The renunciation of optical control in its turn allows for alternative epistemological approaches, “different ways of knowing and interacting with the other,”3 which redefine conventional notions of the self as uniform and contained, and of external reality as stable and verifiable.

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This affirmation of the haptic qualities of the cinematic in particular, and seeing in general, does not call for a return to empiricist formulations of vision as a stream of optical stimuli emanated from a pre-given reality and showered upon the human eye. On the contrary, seeing is very much a cultural practice of perception informed by a multiplicity of historical, economic, social, and ideological factors.4 The disembodiment of vision and its hierarchization as “the noblest of all senses” have been attributed to the rise of individualism and the autonomous enlightened subject during the age of modernity:5 the embodied activity of “seeing with one’s eyes” has metamorphosed into the abstract activity of “seeing in one’s mind,” images have thus become “ideas” and the material human being “an ideal” subject. The metaphoricization of vision not only perpetuates the illusion of unmediated, transparent reproduction of the world, but also denies the role of the body as the site of seeing. An emphasis on vision as embodied and multisensory can therefore destabilize the ideological fundamentals of the autonomous individual as well as undermine the power of visual subjectification. Likewise, an emphasis on seeing as an embodied experience, rather than as an abstract method of knowing a pre-given reality, can challenge the epistemological validity of the external referent, suggesting instead that it is the observer’s body in its metonymic relationship with other bodies that has become the site generating reality.6 What follows, then, is that through the spectator’s non-appropriative haptic engagement with an image — what Marks calls “sensual abandon” — material experiences can be reconstituted. While there is some degree of idealism regarding the “abandoning” of what is a highly cultivated sensorium, Marks’s emphasis on hapticity draws attention not only to the importance of the tactile in cultural production, but also to the political import of embodiment: Haptic visuality implies a fundamental mourning of the absent object or the absent body, where optical visuality attempts to resuscitate it and make it whole. At the same time that it acknowledges that it cannot know the other, haptic visuality attempts to bring it close, in a look that is so intensely involved with the pressure of the other that it cannot take the step back to discern difference, say, to distinguish figure and ground.7

By engaging with an image in a haptic manner, one renounces received notions about the clarity of seeing, the impartiality of detached observation and the empowered position of the all-seeing subject. Instead, what comes to be appreciated is the intimacy of embodied perception, the fluidity of blurred images, the mutuality of tactile epistemology, and the agency acquired through shared vulnerability. Rather than merely celebrating and

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romanticizing the haptic, however, Marks highlights in the above passage its disruptive potential and resistance to being co-opted into an optical regime of sensory plenitude or sensational exposure. Attending to scars, gaps, and fissures, the haptic does not cure, replenish, or expose. When it comes to literary works, a haptic reading focuses on a text’s investment in the sensory in terms of both its construction and its reception, thus contesting the rigid differentiation between cognition and embodiment, the different senses and aesthetics, literature and politics. Even though a book is perceived primarily through vision — both in terms of its textual and visual dimensions — the tactile and the aural cannot be totally excluded. Therefore, my argument in the first instance places emphasis on the physical features of Ondaatje’s books, and the effect of these technologies of production on the meaning and reception of his oeuvre. Ondaatje’s early narrative works The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems and Coming through Slaughter are mixed-media works partaking of the visual, the verbal, the aural, and the tactile mediums. This is reflected in the generic multiplicity of the two works: photographs, popular songs, taped interviews, paintings, poems, films, comics, newspaper interviews, biographies, and detective stories act as themes, sources, or intertextual references. Moreover, Ondaatje’s involvement in the material production of his books, as well as the acknowledged influence of concrete poetry and popular cinema on them, can indicate the importance of the senses and the cinematic as conceptual framework and artistic practice for his oeuvre.8 On the one hand, I discuss these elements as contributing to a more conventional kind of representation, wherein text and sensual perception complement each other in order to move the narrative forward. On the other hand, however, I read the multisensory aspects of both texts as indexical traces of another reality — that of the author and his sources, and that of the characters and their environments — and, thus, as constituent of a fluid interface between reader, author, and text. With respect to both of the above points, the connection with the cinematic is important: the dialogic exchange between visual and aural, tactual and textual, as well as the negotiable position of author and reader, resounds with both the classical and the haptic definitions of the cinematic. According to the former, images, sound, and text will complement each other, building a narrative trajectory that weaves a predictable filmic illusion (Deleuze’s movement-images). At the same time, Ondaatje’s manipulations of narrative, style, language, and layout foreground the ongoing illusion-making process rather than the perfect, final product; they open gaps and contradictions that distance the spectator/reader from the film/text but also invite them to “direct” (in the fashion of Deleuze’s time-images and Marks’s haptic cinema).

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Although critics have explored the influence of different artistic mediums on Ondaatje’s oeuvre,9 the debate has centered on the dialectics between the indeterminacy of life and the stasis of art. Such metaphoricization of the visual and its interaction with the verbal has its merits, but I agree with Will Garrett-Petts that a multisensory approach to Ondaatje’s work — including engagement with visuals and the tactile experience of reading — is a viable alternative to its predominantly textual interpretations.10 Such sensory immersion of the reader reverberates with the collage quality of The Collected Works and Coming through Slaughter: as medleys of fact and fiction, characters and landscapes, they present the reader with a “tactile landscape,” a piecing together of “little bits of mosaic.”11 The reader is offered an intimate close-up of Billy’s and Buddy’s bodies, minds and surroundings, as though exploring a mural with their nose against the wall. The proximity to this unfolding mural does not reveal the big picture or provide a final answer; the reader cannot follow a uniform logic, formulate an ultimate meaning, or pass a judgment on truthfulness. Instead, they are invited to share their bodily vulnerability and epistemological uncertainty with the text, its characters, and by extension, its other readers. Reading in an embodied fashion invites perception “from scratch” in both senses of the word — anew and in a tactile way; to achieve this, hitherto taken-for-granted perceptual regimes have to be dissolved through the reader’s involvement of their entire sensorium — the visual, the aural, the tactile, and the kinesthetic. And the dissolution of prior, optical, epistemologies is inevitably disruptive and potentially violent: if Billy the Kid has been recorded in History and popular myth as a notoriously violent outlaw, what Ondaatje contests in his Collected Works is the violations of History and mainstream cultural products, as well as indiscriminate, facile and unimaginative reading practices. In this sense I also argue that the haptic as a multisensory and intimate investment in a text is central to the formulation and enactment of Ondaatje’s artistic statement. Collapsing the distinction between content and form, reality and representation, reader, writer, and work, his art of becoming, vulnerability, and multisensory engagement is inevitably haptic. It is an art that does not offer a stable, uniform, and complete representation of a pre-given reality, but one that acts as an assemblage with the world of the characters, author, and reader. The notion of the unified self is thus contested: far from being individualized and finite, it is processual and multiple, reflective as well as constitutive of their surroundings. The proximal nature of the haptic and the sense of shared vulnerability call for the dissolution of the inflexible boundaries between self and other premised on optical epistemology;12 and precarious though proximity can be — potentially violent and acquisitive — it nonetheless enables the appreciation of opacity and

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non-identitarian ways of being. It is in the affirmative interaction between art and reality, self and context, intimacy and distance, that “the collected works” of Ondaatje emerge. Whereas one may be tempted to characterize such art as a bold modernist experimentation with form — an argument for which transgressions of boundaries will primarily be metaphors for formal innovation — it is my contention that Ondaatje’s works challenge more than mere aesthetic conventions. Proximal and tactile, Ondaatje’s haptic art puts forward a different epistemology, an epistemology that cherishes the personal and yet is not individualistic, an epistemology that — in Laura Marks’s words — caresses but does not lay bare. On the other hand, a more realist and socially minded critical camp has condemned Ondaatje’s early narratives for their allegedly self-reflexive, solipsistic narrative, and bathetically unbelievable context, ignoring urgent class, gender, and racial issues.13 Premised on a rigid anti-aesthetic definition of reality, these critiques debunk Ondaatje’s works as ahistorical and politically inept aesthetic exercises. Nevertheless, and despite the author’s own declarations of animosity towards both realist and didactic literature,14 I argue that these early works can be discussed as gesturing towards a particular kind of politics — what I have earlier identified as micropolitics. As already mentioned, the haptic nature of Ondaatje’s writing is exemplified by a sustained thematic emphasis on the multisensory and the intimate, and resistance to purely optical modes of representation. On the one hand, it is in the empowerment of the reader granted by hapticity that a micropolitical involvement emerges. The illusion of absolute reproduction of reality is undermined by the incomplete, dynamic, and contradictory “portraits” offered by Ondaatje’s texts. On the other hand, by questioning hitherto taken for granted optical discourses — historical, linguistic, or literary — haptic writing makes possible the validation of the “bad footage” that never made it to the big screen of History. Unlike the strategies of realist and didactic literature, the micropolitical approach, through proximity and affect, validates personal and intimate everyday experiences, those unorganized sub-group encounters that fall outside the hierarchies of History and conventional forms of political writing.15 Thus, a further emphasis in this chapter is placed on the role of haptic writing as shaping a micropolitical historiography. Unlike Billy the Kid’s widely known legend, Buddy Bolden’s life is quite peripheral to official historicization. Documentary evidence about his life, such as tapes, interviews, film reels, and photographs, are juxtaposed to one another in Coming through Slaughter, approaching the improvisational, dynamic, and non-referential qualities of his art. The collection of the sparse evidence by Webb and the anonymous narrator reminds one of the creative excavations

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of Billy’s corpse in The Collected Works. However, the polyphonic traces of Bolden’s existence destabilize the initial drive for optical uniformity; instead, they invite the reader to personally engage with the findings, while also pointing at the gaps in historical records. In the resulting assemblage, the figures of reader, narrator, and character lose clear-cut coordinates and dissolve in their surroundings, renouncing mainstream historical discourse and art. In line with the dissolution of normative representation, the little acknowledged jazz musician Buddy Bolden and photographer E. J. Bellocq emerge into Ondaatje’s historiographic project in conjunction with others absenced by History, such as the Storyville prostitutes and the embankment mattress whores. Not only are these women given a presence in Bolden’s new hapticized biography, but their historical erasure is pre-emptively enacted by Bellocq slashing their photographs and by pimps mutilating their bodies. The haptic, therefore, both inflicts metaphorical violence on the essentially violent optical gaze and offers an intimate look at the all too real lives absenced by History; absences that somewhat paradoxically have been inscribed (materially presenced) on historically unrecognized bodies. It is in the uncomfortable intimacy of this haptic look that Ondaatje’s micropolitical art emerges. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Ondaatje’s documentaries of the 1970s as cinematic renditions of his haptic writing. If Sons of Captain Poetry presents an assemblage of bpNichol’s performance of his concrete poetry, images from his life and work, and snippets from his interviews with Ondaatje, The Clinton Special questions the distinction between real life experiences and staged performance, between actors and director, characters and viewers, by bringing about an assemblage of reality, theater, and cinema, on the one hand, and reality, documentary reconstruction, and fictional invention, on the other. It is ultimately in the proximity among those involved in the art of creation that the boundaries erected by detached forms of knowledge, optical control, and veracity claims collapse. In the consequent epistemological uncertainty and sense of vulnerability, a feeling of mutual appreciation and recognition can arise — an ethical stance informed by the affective potential of the body.

Hapticizing the “I”/“eye” in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid That Ondaatje’s text opens with an empty frame, a missing photograph, and a verbal description of its taking signals the book’s resistance to conventional forms of narration. The ensuing poem listing “the killed” by the yet unseen protagonist surprisingly ends with the latter’s own premature murder, “and Pat Garrett/sliced off my head.”16 This opening does not simply reiterate

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the already known fact that the famous outlaw is dead. By not providing a visual equivalent of Billy’s portrait, The Collected Works distances itself from the familiar popular myth; by starting off with Billy’s death and foregrounding the gaps and absences in his historicization, Ondaatje discards the biographical mould for a process of writing that incorporates the discovery and collection of diverse, albeit unreliable, textual and material artifacts. Photographs, witness statements, and newspaper interviews contradict each other, being not more trustworthy than the popular comics or rumors about the Kid. Thus, after Billy’s second missing photograph, which does not do him justice according to Paulita Maxwell, the Kid finally announces the beginning of his story: Not a story about me through their eyes then. Find the beginning, the slight silver key to unlock it, to dig it out. Here then is a maze to begin, be in. Two years ago Charlie Bowdre and I criss-crossed the Canadian border. [. . .] The two of us, our criss-cross like a whip in slow motion, the ridge of action rising and falling, getting narrower in radius till it ended and we drifted down to Mexico and old heat. That there is nothing of depth, of significant accuracy, of wealth in the image, I know. It is there for a beginning.17

As an echo of the missing photograph, this passage overtly declares not being yet another version of the popular legend; it underlines the impotence of “their eyes” — those of all the historians, filmmakers, and storytellers who claim to know the truth. The rhizome of Billy’s life, just like the rhizome of Ondaatje’s text, resists being framed within the distant optical image of conventional myths and purely textual readings. What is necessary, this passage suggests, is intimate engagement with the story through the involvement of the reader’s entire sensorium (visual, aural, tactile). Thus, Garrett-Petts argues that “[r]eading Billy becomes an overtly physical activity, a matter of carefully examining the evidence, of comparing photographs, of tracking down references, of turning the pages with deliberate intent.”18 It is only through multisensory readings of the Billy the Kid artifact, as designed by Ondaatje and his manipulated sources,19 that one can avoid the discursive abuses committed by History and mainstream culture. Such a multisensory engagement will not provide the key to interpreting character or author; instead, it will enable the reader’s appreciation of the opacity of being and writing. In this sense, the reading of the Kid cannot follow the rules of linearity; similar to Billy and Charlie’s travels, it will defy boundaries and easy mapping, offering instead a cinematic “whip in slow motion.” Just like the whip-like contour of Charlie and Billy’s journeys — also gesturing towards the liminal Canadianness of the text — what is available to the

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reader is a multiplicity of stories that meander across boundaries and avoid containment. In a similar fashion, as a blend of fact and fiction as well as the verbal, visual, and tactile, Ondaatje’s text advocates multiplicity of readings. Rather than being only a text about the notorious gunman, therefore, The Collected Works becomes an exploration of haptic ways of reading. The narrator, who has suggested that the image of Billy and Charlie’s rhizomatic movements outlines the multiple trajectories of the narrative, also knows that “the others” will “kill” the multiplicity into a distant optical representation “through their eyes” only. That this distant gaze is inadequate is signaled by an earlier section where Billy is haunted by the image of a dismembered face: The others, I know, did not see the wounds appearing in the sky, in the air. Sometimes a normal forehead in front of me leaked brain gasses. Once a nose clogged right before me, a lock of skin formed over the nostrils, and the shocked face had to start breathing through mouth, but then the mustache bound itself in the lower teeth and he began to gasp loud the hah! hah! going strong — churned onto the floor, collapsed out, seeming in the end to be breathing out of his eye — tiny needle jets of air reaching into the throat.20

The facial close-up shows a proximal and engaged reader, a haptic reader. Reading with their nose against the page, they hapticize the Billy the Kid legend, which becomes negotiable and mutable. Despite the reduced distance, however, access — to Billy, to the text, to the reader — is barred: not only are a number of sense-related orifices blocked (the nasal and oral ones) but others (throat and eyes) assume painfully untypical functions in order to sustain life. The discursive violence of representation (by “the others,” the myth- and History-makers) is somewhat replicated by the violence inflicted on and by the intimate reader, to be subsequently echoed in Billy’s rape by the sun. It is both the loss of optical control and the painful experience of vulnerability that inform the violence of “the collected works.” A couple of pages later, the haptic eyes reappear again, in the midst of Charlie’s death throes, while most of his body parts are badly deformed by the “bullets giggling.”21 The closeness between characters and reader in this episode is invoked by the image of the hands upon which all subjectivities encounter. Billy’s hands catch Charlie and at the same time are endangered by his leaking body; the new line at the end of the first stanza — “your hands/while the eyes” — acts like a tracking shot of the Kid’s hands, which imperceptibly transform into the hands of the reader following Bowdre’s death. The hands, in the act of reading, become tactile extensions of the reader’s eyes, which “gr[o]w all over his body” and catch intimate glimpses

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of Charlie’s convulsive faciality. The ensuing zoom-out, conveyed by the wide blank space between the two stanzas, allows for the reader’s retrieval of optical distance, and we hear the readers-turned-viewers discuss the scene in a nonchalant way having given up “hen since then.” Hands imagery is pervasive in The Collected Works. They are the mechanical yet beautiful — and in Billy’s case even mesmerizing22 — bodily extensions that inflict death. The gunman’s fingers can literally “blot out the horizon,”23 “bullet claws” become “women fingers”24 coming after Billy, and the sun is transformed into a violent, raping hand: Down the long cool hand went scratching the freckles and warts in my throat breaking through veins like pieces of long glass tubing, touched my heart with his wrist, down he went the liquid yellow from my busted brain finally vanishing as it passed through soft warm stomach like a luscious blood wet oasis, weaving in and out of the red yellow blue green nerves moving uncertainly through wrong fissures ending pausing at cul de sacs of bone then retreating slow leaving the pain of suction then down the proper path through pyramids of bone that were there when I was born, through grooves the fingers spanning the merging paths of medians of blue matter, the long cool hand going down brushing cobwebs of nerves the horizontal pain pits, lobules gyres notches arcs tracts fissures roots’ white insulation of dead seven year cells clinging things rubbing them off on the tracts of spine down the cool precise fingers went into the cistern of bladder.25

As a reversal of the usual image of Billy the Kid, it is the outlaw that is subjected to violence here. The solar deus ex machina does not restore the balance disrupted by Billy’s crimes in the same way that Pat Garrett’s morality of an assassin prevents him from administering unbiased justice. Instead, the sun becomes a sadistic hand, which penetrates Billy’s body, tears apart his organs, and rapes him. Similar to Billy’s encounter with the haptic reader, the heightened sense of tactile experience in this scene is intensified by the onomatopoeia, alliterations, repetitions, present participles, and lack of punctuation. The corporeal passage of the solar limb escalates from the mild discomfort of the “scratching” in Billy’s throat and the “touching” of his heart to the “pain of suction” felt during the sun’s blundering in the rhizome of Billy’s viscera. Even though the sun’s hand embarks on the sodomization of the Kid with a surgical precision, the pair of “cool precise fingers” are soon thrown off their “proper path” by rhizomes of nerves, gyres, and fissures, as well as “pyramids” of bone, grooves, and tracts. Echoing the multiple nature of “the collected works,” the movements of the solar hand are impeded by cul de sacs (“moving uncertainly,” “ending,” “pausing,” “retreating”), thus

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conveying the impossibility of constructing a uniform reading of the text. As the sun’s violation goes further down, in the nether bonier regions of the body (of “lobules gyres notches arcs tracts fissures roots”), the pace of the prose speeds up with lists of unpunctuated, alliterative participles, and nouns piling up on top of each other until the only image left is not that of Billy but of “the cool fingers” in him. The impressions this tracking close-up leaves are primarily of direction, color, and texture. The transformation of the sun into a sadistic hand has a dual effect. On the one hand, similarly to optical readership, it reenacts the violence inflicted by the will to gaze at the sensational, to grasp and kill it into knowledge, and ultimately to force feed (through the “long glass tubing”) the popular image to the readers. The sun’s bleaching effect on Billy’s self parallels his image in popular culture: photographs, films, interviews, stories, picture books, legends, rumors have overexposed him into disappearance.26 On the other hand, the sun’s bodily violation of Billy, similarly to the eyes growing on Charlie’s body, challenge distanced acts of reading and transform the characters into an all-sensitive skin, which, like the page on which they are written, interacts with its readers. A haptic reading, then, is accompanied by the inevitably violent dissolution of the optical; at the same time, the two exist, as Laura Marks points out, on a continuum and it is their interaction with each other that guarantees the vitality of reading: But just as the optical needs the haptic, the haptic must return to the optical. To maintain optical distance is to die the death of abstraction. But to lose all distance from the world is to die a material death, to become indistinguishable from the rest of the world. Life is served by the ability to come close, pull away, come close again.27

In this sense, Billy defies the “eyes” of “the others,” yet succumbs to the eyes in the sky and the fingers of the sun. Such painful physicality is appreciated by him, as declared in the poem about “a newsman’s brain.”28 The moral of a newsman resembles that of the gunman: a lot is eliminated — the former will do away with the corporeality of the body, emptying it of content to feed it only with metaphors in order to drive home abstract morals; and the latter divests the mind of all guilt in order to perceive of the body as yet another one in the diagram of survival or the everyday schedule of casual murders. But the split between morality and the body, the valorization or renunciation of either of them, is what breeds the sick justification of elimination, of murder. While this poem is a critique of the tick-tocking abstractionist mind of people with moralist preoccupations, comparing them to the click-clicking brain of a well-oiled gunman, it also reasserts the dialogic relationship

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between the optical and the haptic by restoring the lost tactile aspect to the optical perspective of morality-driven beings. It is in the contact with the haptic object, not only watching “for hours,” but watching the stomach of clocks and shifting their parts that one experiences life and emerges living. Although Ondaatje has been criticized for his “detachment [which] begins to replace emotional empathy as a measure for poetic talent” and for the over-aestheticized and politically unviable violence of his male protagonists,29 the violent restoration of haptic involvement questions the optical clichés circulated by the civilization and art of morality, whose violence is informed by the imposition of uniformity.30 The excessive violence Billy and Ondaatje have been accused of dissolves optical distance and diffuses the unified self. In the haptic experience of an artifact, one does not kill life, but relives and recreates it. The blurring of the boundaries between character, author, and reader, as well as the emphasis on the physical and intimate, enable — as exemplified in Ondaatje’s later works — the negation of identitarian thought and the affirmation of non-appropriative ways of being. The resistance to optical reading is best exemplified in the use of cinematographic techniques in The Collected Works. The cinematic is present in the work through allusions to film scripts, shooting on set, director’s interventions, and camerawork. While these formal devices contribute to the unfolding of the narrative, the use of the cinematic has a thematic significance too. Following Deleuze’s discussion of movement and time imagery, and Marks’s analysis of the political significance of the haptic image, I argue that Ondaatje’s use of the cinematographic gestures at the emergence of the haptic reader that Billy is looking for. Contrary to a purely optical engagement with the cinematic image, the haptic experience does not arrest life; it does not manipulate light to expose a stable, referential object. Hence, the book opens by declaring its “lens wide open”:31 I send you a picture of Billy made with the Perry shutter as quick as it can be worked — Pyro and soda developer. I am making daily experiments now and find I am able to take passing horses at a lively trot square across the line of fire — bits of snow in the air — spokes well defined — some blur on top of wheel but sharp in the main — men walking are no trick — I will send you proofs sometime. I shall show you what can be done from the saddle without ground glass or tripod — please notice when you get the specimens that they were made with the lens wide open and many of the best exposed when my horse was in motion.32

Whereas the italicized font invokes an authentic handwritten testimony, the potential unreliability of the photo is suggested both by the empty frame

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Michael Ondaatje

above it and the description of its taking. Despite the good quality of his photographs of moving objects and people, the photographer Huffman complains of fuzziness at the edges, a result of his camera’s wide-open lens and slow shutter. Even though he attempts to approximate the objects of his photographs by being in motion himself, some images — such as the one above his description, i.e. Billy’s first empty portrait — are either missing or overexposed. Nevertheless, the gap that this picture leaves, similarly to the blurry edges of his other photographs, are later to be supplemented by the associative links that the reader makes in the process of experiencing “the collected works.” In this way, through the reading process that it triggers, the still photograph assumes the mobility of a cinematic image. Since this image contains in itself the potential of further (dis)entanglement, it is not an immobile section of Billy’s life taken out of context, but opens to the reader a variety of entryways to the rhizome of Ondaatje’s text. Haptic engagement with this incomplete, yet telling, image provides for the mobility that still photographs lack. Thus, the overall haptic strategy in the presentation of Billy the Kid is cinematographically informed. Furthermore, Billy’s haptic “photographer” — not unlike Huffman, who will take the passing horses and walking men while he himself is riding — aims at achieving proximity with the filmed/represented entity. The camera/pen in the artistic hand becomes a kinesthetic extension of eyesight, allowing the artist to be affected by details otherwise imperceptible to the distant eye of optical observation. The unreliability of Billy’s portraits, however, appears to be unsettling for Paulita Maxwell. Referring to the same, or perhaps a different (but also missing) picture of the Kid, she finds that it “makes him rough and uncouth” and does not think “it does Billy justice.”33 Paulita’s comments question the pictorial fidelity to the original; however, this is construed in a positive way in The Collected Works. The white space above her remark is not framed, thus giving her the freedom to inscribe her own testimony. In a similar vein, the concluding framed page, which contains Ondaatje’s photograph in a cowboy outfit,34 offers the author’s personal contribution to the construction of this “other” portrait of the notorious outlaw. Bearing in mind Laura Marks’s distinction between haptic and optical visuality, one can regard these reports as challenging the authority of the optical myth of the Kid. Sporting only one, albeit fictional, photograph of the outlaw, on the cover of the “Billy the Kid and the Princess” comic book excerpt,35 The Collected Works does not make another contribution to Billy the Kid’s public overexposure. Instead, by including the author’s own photograph on the last page — without filling in the frame, without aiming for truthful representation and without having clear definition — the book offers intimate and material testimonies to the sensational public story. Similarly to Huffman’s admission of good definition

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at the center and blurs at the edges, Paulita’s memories and Ondaatje’s cowboy photo, as well as The Collected Works as a whole, thrive in the fuzzy borderline areas of Billy the Kid stories. The haptic mapping of those hazy regions is itself contradictory and incomplete, but it legitimates personal and embodied experiences as a valid contribution to the haptic historiographic process. The challenge to optical representation, and by extension to History, is also performed by Ondaatje’s hapticization of the original photographic material he has used. Acknowledged as photographs by the American frontier photographer L. A. Huffman, the majority of these visual materials have acquired a new meaning in the context of “the collected works.” Whereas Huffman’s originals attempted to capture the disappearing frontier life in the 1880s, Ondaatje’s edited versions attempt to unsettle another myth of the West — that of Billy the Kid — and the idea of the inviolability of History. This is achieved through a complex montage technique incorporating photographic and textual material, on the one hand, and through Ondaatje’s manipulation of Huffman’s photographs (primarily by cropping the originals and changing their graininess, contrast, and scale), on the other. In both cases, the reader is attributed a highly participatory role in the dialogic processes by tracing intra- and inter-textual connections, and reading pictures of low definition and hazy outlines. A pertinent example is the story about the capture of the Kid and Charlie Bowdre’s death. Obliquely referred to in the opening poem about the killed,36 Charlie’s death is then explicitly mentioned in the poem “When I caught Charlie Bowdre dying”37 and accompanied by the first visual image in the book.38 If Billy’s visceral description of Charlie’s death throes has called for an engaged reader, this is also demanded by the unclear and grainy close-up of a uniformed man opposite this poem. A more conventional reading of this image as representing the excessive violence and arbitrary justice of the frontier,39 however, is complicated when one comes across the second image: the smudge of a large building.40 The prose text to the left of this blurry image of a barn-like structure describes Charlie’s murder in a conspicuously cinematographic fashion: January at Tivan Arroyo, called Stinking Springs more often. With me, Charlie, Wilson, Dave Rudabaugh. Snow. Charlie took my hat and went out to get wood and feed the horses. The shot burnt the clothes on his stomach off and lifted him right back into the room. Snow on Charlie’s left boot. He had taken one step out. In one hand had been an axe, in the other a pail. No guns. [. . .] Snow outside. Wilson, Dave Rudabaugh and me. No windows, the door open so we could see. Four horses outside.41

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Michael Ondaatje

The angle in this scene is limited, most likely Billy’s, suggested by the use of personal pronouns and by the movement of his gaze. The snow reference and the enumeration of the people in the cabin frame the scene and suggest a final fade-out. However, Ondaatje is far from closing the episode. About 20 pages later, he revisits this scene, resorting to the framing image, which is now utilized as a fade-in: Snow outside. Wilson, Dave Rudabaugh and me. No windows, the door open so we could see. Four horses outside. Garrett aimed and shot to sever the horse reigns. He did that for 3 of them so they got away and 3 of us couldnt escape. He tried for 5 minutes to get the reigns on the last horse but kept missing. So he shot the horse. We came out. No guns.42

Whereas in the first shooting scene quoted above, the framing is achieved via a chiasmic effect, i.e. the scene opens with the whereabouts, the participants and the snow, introduced in this order, and ends with these elements arranged in the reverse, in its sequel the framing echoes the final fade-out and eventually closes with still another repetition from the first scene — “No guns.” On the other hand, the aforementioned photographic image of a large building with some people loitering at the entrance contrasts sharply with the bloody shooting taking place in the verbal counterpart. Reading this episode with Huffman’s original Ye Studio in mind — which shows that the building is a photographer’s studio, with the person on the chair being most likely a sitter43 — adds further metafictonal elements to the interpretation: the blurry building in Ondaatje’s text emerges as both a place to shoot (kill) and a place to shoot (take) photographs, and these meanings are brought together in the section when Billy assumes a shooting position on the roof: Down the street was a dog. Some mut spaniel, black and white. One dog, Garrett and two friends, stud looking, came down the street to the house, to me. Again. Down the street was a dog. Some mut spaniel, black and white. One dog, Garrett and two friends came down the street to the house, to me. [. . .] All this I would have seen if I was on the roof looking.44

The opening two paragraphs are rendered in the cinematic fashion of shooting a film. The short “Again” with the white space around it functions as an index of the director’s cut; whereas the repetition of the scene also suggests a “Take 2.” Such foregrounding of the writing process as filming unsettles authorial control and includes the reader in the shooting process, which

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paradoxically also includes Billy himself (on the roof watching). In this way, the earlier photograph of the military man who appears to be walking out of the frame can be read in terms of the violence entailed in art, also suggested by what appears to be a pile of bones in the foreground of this grainy close-up. Huffman’s original Grave of Colonel Keogh reveals that the place is a military graveyard, where large numbers of unnamed soldiers (except for Colonel Keogh) are buried. Thus, the dialogue between Ondaatje’s edited photographs and texts, and Huffman’s originals effectively summarizes the Canadian writer’s artistic statement: if art entails material engagement and recreation of another reality — exemplified by Ondaatje’s use of Burns’s text and Huffman’s photographs — it also invites a closer look at realities ignored by the distant gaze of History. Walking out of the still frames of History is the equivalent of sidestepping the logic of optical representation; Ondaatje’s haptic writing zooms in on those left out, unhistoricized and unwitnessed. Such historical and artistic revisions are also enacted in the double-take cinematographic principle employed in The Collected Works. As historiographic approach, it destabilizes even more narrative authority and historical veracity. In the episode of Billy’s trip with Angela D to the Chisums’ ranch, the Kid is building a vivid mental image of what Sallie Chisum is doing that day. Halfway through the account, he cuts, admits a mistake, runs the reel backwards, and does a “Take 2”: “No I forgot, she had stopped that now.”45 Rather than using the director-like curt expression “Again” as in his capture scene, Billy here explicitly foregrounds his error: unlike conventional filming techniques, however, “the collected works” keep the good and the bad footage, rendering it impossible to decide whose point of view one sees and whose story is valid. Likewise, the poem that proleptically describes Billy’s murder by Pat Garrett and opens with a bracketed “(To come),”46 resembles an editor’s comment in the margins of a script in the same way that the other bracketed section — about Garrett’s stuffed animals47 — stands for footage that is still to be edited. In the closing sections of The Collected Works a variety of voices “sum up” the ways of reading “the collected works.” There is the optical reader whose reading will become yet another legend to be “sold.”48 The motivation behind such reading is sensationalist and commercial, and the pictures taken by The Texas Star will be “cleaned” so as to continue the tradition of overexposing the Kid. But there is also the haptic reader, whose interest in the tactile exploration of the text recognizes the opacity of others. It is the same artist who in the last section of The Collected Works describes how he “collected” Billy. Like Ondaatje’s blurs in Huffman’s photographs, the haptic artist does not have a complete portrait of Billy: his hotel room is full

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Michael Ondaatje

of cigarette smoke, his mouth tastes nicotine.49 The last page suggests that the empty frame the book opens with has been at least partially filled; however, the person in the small snapshot resembles Billy the Kid only in outfit. The photograph of young Michael also acts as a continuation of the scene of the exhausted artist: unable to compile “the collected works,” he will simply add his own photograph. While the snapshot does not add much to the expected and deferred portrait of the Kid, it does suggest that optical representation and History can be reclaimed, and that an engaged, haptic reading of what may be construed as popular myths can achieve this subversion. Ondaatje’s haptic writing, then, draws attention to and enables an individual’s direct involvement in what is traditionally an optical process of History writing.

Coming through the Haptic Cut: History in the Making and Coming through Slaughter Unlike The Collected Works, which opens with the empty frame of a photograph and a long caption by the photographer Huffman, Coming through Slaughter starts with a black-and-white photograph, whose quasi-caption — namely, Louis Jones’s memories — appears a couple of pages later and identifies the photograph’s referent as Buddy Bolden’s band.50 Unlike The Collected Works, where ten visual images plus two empty frames simultaneously complement and destabilize the verbal layer, Coming through Slaughter has only two instances of visual material and both of them function as epigraphs to the book. Similarly to The Collected Works, Coming through Slaughter announces its objective to be the revision of History and this statement is reiterated by the highly synesthetic visual images referred to above. The uncaptioned (or, belatedly captioned) photograph of Buddy’s band, visualizing a group of various sound-makers, is itself a multisensory image indicative of the quality of the prose we are about to encounter. Subsequently supplemented by the narrator’s (also belated) comment about the scarcity of historical and other records memorializing the art and lives of Buddy and his band,51 the photograph gestures at its, and Ondaatje’s, purpose — to rectify historical excisions by exposing its own deferred and incomplete nature. The second visual image — the three captioned sonographs of dolphin squawks and whistles representing visually what is essentially an auditory perception — not only enhances the multisensory quality of Ondaatje’s writing, but also provides an idiosyncratic map of the multiple narrative models to be adopted:

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Three sonographs — pictures of dolphin sounds made by a machine that is more sensitive than the human ear. The top left sonograph shows a “squawk.” Squawks are common emotional expressions that have many frequencies or pitches, which are vocalized simultaneously. The top right sonograph is a whistle. Note that the number of frequencies is small and this gives a “pure” sound — not a squawk. Whistles are like personal signatures for dolphins and identify each dolphin as well as its location. The middle sonograph shows a dolphin making two kinds of signals simultaneously. The vertical stripes are echolocation clicks [. . .] and the dark, mountain-like humps are the signature whistles. No one knows how a dolphin makes both whistles and echolocation clicks simultaneously.52

The passage is preoccupied with language, its capabilities and limits. Squawks, echolocation clicks, and signature whistles are effective enough paralinguistic units to ensure dolphins’ successful navigation, as well as emotional expression and individual identification. Although the analogy with human communication is inevitable, the emphasis of the purportedly scientific statement is on the impurity and multiplicity of the sounds: the emotional charge (“multiple frequencies or pitches”) of the squawks on the left-hand side, the personal (idiosyncratic) quality of the signature whistles on the right-hand side, and the multiplicity of sounds in the middle sonograph destabilize any initial conclusions as to their informational value. That the device used to record them is more “sensitive than the human ear” draws attention to what usually goes unnoticed in communication; at the same time, even though the caption provides a metalinguistic translation of the sonographs — explaining what they stand for as general paralinguistic units — and even though the machine has registered sounds to the minutest detail, the meaning of each sonograph is withheld. All the reader is presented with is a discursive depiction of a meta-meaning and a visual rendition of the constituent elements of sound; inviting them to partake of the arbitrary task of ascribing meaning to a multiplicity of elements, Coming through Slaughter also alerts the audience to the multiple channels of communication — sensory, cognitive, emotional, machinic — as well as to the limits imposed on meaning- and History-making. As if following the description of the sonographs, the narrative of Coming through Slaughter starts at the “right-hand side,” locating and mapping the geography and identity of the once famous cornet player Buddy Bolden. Combining the search for recently disappeared Buddy and the excavations of a historically forgotten Bolden — carried out by his old-time friend, Webb, and an anonymous narrator, respectively — the opening third-person narration unfolds as if seen through an omniscient film camera. At first

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Webb’s investigation follows a movement-image trajectory — the detective’s moves follow the evidence collected from Crawley, Nora, Cornish, Bellocq, and Pickett — but it is subsequently disrupted by time-images of Buddy’s seclusion at the Brewitts’ house in Shell Beach and in Webb’s cabin at Lake Pontchartrain. The anonymous narrator’s gaze initially compiles the information around the historical Bolden; however, the emerging intimacy to the object of his investigation leads to his renunciation of the authorial “I” and control over representation. The omniscient camera becomes a handheld camera, which offers not only a partial intimate image, but also a flawed noisy picture. The “noise” in the artistic camera, moving towards the “left-hand side” sonograph of an affective squawk, enlivens the unfolding of the detective story via its multisensory and emotional engagement with Bolden and his art, and their haptic reinvention on the page. Similarly to the proliferation of “collected works” no longer sanctioned by the Kid, the last section of Coming through Slaughter brings together Buddy’s sensually intense silence in the East Louisiana State Hospital and the clamor of tapes, interviews, and reels others have produced about him. Incomplete, erroneous, and contradictory, these documents themselves hardly provide any clarity about the object of their investigation. And this is not their purpose; the function of all the “hard evidence” included in the book is to signal an intimacy with the reality described, in order to trigger off a haptic experience in the reader. The documents do not elucidate Bolden; instead, they lead to the “[t]he right ending [which] is an open door you can’t see too far out of.”53 If Ondaatje’s approach in the earlier text has been to undermine the claims for veracity of optical knowledge (such as the Billy the Kid myth) and optical representation (such as realist and didactic narratives) by leaving the frame above Huffman’s letter empty and keeping it more or less empty until the final page, with Coming through Slaughter he seems to have opted for the reverse procedure (albeit with the same agenda). Starting with a relatively legible photograph, the narrative gradually deconstructs the purported knowledge this visual document stands for by reminding the reader of the process of its making. Thus, Webb comes across the photographer Bellocq, who has the negative of the only existing photograph of Bolden — which the reader assumes to be the one with which the book has opened.54 A detailed description recounts the coming into being of this photograph, which has also triggered the anonymous narrator’s interest in the historically absenced Bolden: The two of them [Webb and Bellocq] watching the pink rectangle as it slowly began to grow black shapes, coming fast now. Then the sudden vertical lines which rose out of the pregnant white paper which were the outlines of the six

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Haptic Writing as Affective Cinema men and their formally held instruments. [. . .] Watching their friend float into the page smiling at them, the friend who in reality had reversed the process and gone back into white, who in this bad film seemed to have already half-receded with that smile which may not have been a smile at all, which may have been his mad dignity.55

The dynamic nature of this passage — conveyed through the short sentences, predominance of present participles, and lack of consistent punctuation — recounts in a cinematic fashion the birth of Buddy’s image out of the pregnant whiteness of the page. The unreliability of this piece of “hard evidence” is suggested by the poor quality of the film, as well as by the incomplete image of Buddy that “floats” in the photographer’s sink. The cross-cutting shots zoom in on Bolden and then on other members of the band, thus merging Webb’s and Bellocq’s point of view with that of the reader, to gradually withdraw to an over-the-shoulder shot that includes the two observers — detective and photographer. By following closely the production of the only visual evidence of the jazzman, by watching the searchers watch the coming into existence of this evidence, Ondaatje’s reader also becomes complicit in a process of history-making. Like The Collected Works, Coming through Slaughter declares itself to be interested not in the final image but in its production, not in the ultimate interpretation but in the processes of reading and writing. The dialogic relationship between reader and narrator, text and image, is mobilized about ten pages later when a verbal diagram of the same photograph is provided: Jimmy Johnson

Bolden

on bass

Willy Cornish

Willy Warner

on valve trombone

on clarinet

Brock Mumford

Frank Lewis

on guitar

on clarinet56

This verbal translation of a pictorial image is largely based on topography, whereby one is able to identify the members of Bolden’s band by their location in the photograph and the instruments they are holding, which is all the information Ondaatje’s diagram gives. With one exception: although Bolden’s surname is present in Ondaatje’s word-picture, there is a gap where one expects to see/read his instrument and no indication is given of his first name. This irregularity singles out character and photograph; at the same time, the blank space under Bolden’s name also highlights the unreliability of

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the image, defined by the narrator as “not good or precise.”57 The presumed prioritization of the photograph — located at the beginning of Coming through Slaughter, whereas the above word-image comes sixty pages into the text — as a more faithful rendition of Bolden is undermined. The gaps in the diagram therefore question the documentary value and unmediated nature of the photograph as well as its (optical) reading for purely informative purposes. Voids and holes, as Gilles Deleuze has pointed out, perform the critical task of exposing the political, economic, and socio-cultural embeddedness of representation: [I]t is necessary to make holes, to introduce voids and white spaces, to rarefy the image, by suppressing many things that have been added to make us believe that we were seeing everything. It is necessary to make a division or make emptiness in order to find the whole again.58

Ondaatje’s literary zoom-in on the production and manipulation of images, supplemented by his own editing of “voids and white spaces,” contests the wholeness and veracity of historical records and cultural products. The ongoing dialogue between the verbal and the pictorial, the auditory and the tactile, of Coming through Slaughter frames the text as equally imprecise and incomplete, suggesting that the promise “This is what you see”59 will remain at least partially unfulfilled. In this sense, the “whole” that the reader finds is the realization that Ondaatje’s text cannot and will not fill the historical gap around Buddy (or Billy); it is openness to difference and willingness to read anew rather than finality and closure that “the seeing of the whole” will involve. The rarefaction of History and normative representation performed in the opening images of Coming through Slaughter necessitates an active reader, who is frequently invoked by this “highly invitational text.”60 The introduction to Bolden’s geography is addressed to the reader, who is invited to float — similarly to Buddy’s image floating in Bellocq’s sink — through a rundown area in New Orleans. The panning shots of the literary camera trace buildings and streets, then freeze and zoom in, back in time, on incidents and rumors from the lives of local hustlers; and amidst these stories fades in the image of Buddy Bolden in N. Joseph’s shaving parlor.61 With the next cinematic cut, signaled by typographical markers such as an asterisk and a gap, more facets to Buddy’s life are offered as if in a fast forward pan: “A barber, publisher of The Cricket, a cornet player, good husband and father, and an infamous man about town.”62 After a quick sequence of similarly edited glimpses at Bolden’s various occupations, the disappearance of “the best and the loudest and most loved jazzman of his time”63 is announced,

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and Webb commences his investigation. This cinematic sequence acts as a prolepsis to Webb’s searching gaze; however, the self-reflective nature of Coming through Slaughter suggests that the opening panning shots are there for the reader, offering them “a maze to begin, be in.”64 Not only is the reader encouraged to “float” through Bolden’s old neighborhood and explore a partial history — “here there is little recorded history”65 — but they are also alerted that this process is different from the penetrative gaze of official historical records. After Buddy’s second and final disappearance into the silence of the House of Detention and East Louisiana State Hospital, the narrator steps in again only to register dissatisfaction with his own historiographic endeavors: There is so little noise that I easily hear the click of my camera as I take fast bad photographs into the sun aiming at the barber shop he probably worked in. [. . .] For I had done that. Stood, and with a razor-blade cut into cheeks and forehead, shaved hair. Defiling people we did not wish to be.66

The “click” of the narrator’s cognitive tool “aiming at” Buddy and his barbershop echoes the threatening “click” of Billy the Kid’s camera/gun. Unlike the poor quality of Bellocq’s photograph of Bolden’s band, the narrator’s fast photographs freeze Buddy’s neighborhood into the fourth wall of optical illusion — a memorialization seen as violent and scarring. The intrusive and unilateral aspects of such representation, signaled in the above quotation by the demeaning effect of the narrator’s “fast bad photographs” on the subject of his investigation, are also reflected in and rejected by the narrator breaking through the mirror of optical illusion: The thin sheaf of information. Why did my senses stop at you? There was the sentence, “Buddy Bolden became a legend when he went berserk in a parade . . .” What was there in that, before I knew your nation your colour your age, that made me push my arm forward and spill it through the front of your mirror and clutch myself? Did not want to pose in your accent but think in your brain and body.67

Character, reader, and narrator merge into one and the identitarian boundary between self and other dissolves with the smashing of the mirror and the assault on “the I”: the tangible and mutable arm breaks the solid mirror, spills forth, and suffocates the “I”/the all-seeing “eye” of the narrator. The “I” thus violated is optical, disembodied, and distant; the narrator is dissatisfied with the “objective” knowledge of the social, racial and linguistic, or demographic characteristics of his protagonist — knowledge that ignores the

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intimate emotions and sensory memories. The thinness of such knowledge is a reference to the exclusive nature of official History, whose eclectic eye has obliterated the multiplicity of Bolden’s life, straitjacketing him into an iconic image of jazz, and has relegated to the historical margins the ineluctable presence of the Storyville prostitutes, whose exclusion echoes the mutilation of the mattress whores. The thinness also refers to the elimination of opacity in History: thus, the Kid has been deprived of his singular existence and turned into a myth; Bolden exists only as a footnote in the history of jazz; and the prostitutes appear only as anonymous sitters (“sinners”) in Bellocq’s portraits. The gap under Buddy’s name on Ondaatje’s diagram and the absence of the prostitutes’ images from the book, therefore, embody simultaneously the excisions committed by History’s optical eye and the opacity that cannot be captured by this distant gaze. In contrast, the address to a “you” in the passage above — a “you,” which could be either a character or a reader — looks for intimacy, which is achieved through the mélange of cognition and embodiment, through thinking in the other’s body and brain, rather than thinking about or as if being the other. This intimacy caresses without exposing; it empathizes without appropriating; it rejoices without exoticizing. If Ondaatje’s hapticized renditions of Buddy’s photograph and the narrator’s investigation trigger one form of interrogation of opticity, Bellocq’s pictures of the Storyville prostitutes constitute another. A somewhat paradoxical friend of the “social dog” Bolden,68 the hydrocephalic photographer takes photographs of the prostitutes and “romances”69 them with a knife.70 Unlike the copy of Bolden’s only photograph, which is reproduced visually in the text, these portraits are only verbally presenced: Snap. Lady with dog. Lady on sofa half naked. Snap. Naked lady. Lady next to dresser. Lady at window. Snap. Lady on balcony sunlight. Holding up her arm for the shade.71

The short, clipped sentences and onomatopoeic effect of Ondaatje’s prose compose the verbal translation of the auditory experience of Bellocq’s clicking camera, not much dissimilar from the unsatisfactory photographic exercises of the narrator. At the same time, as a verbal translation of the images of the Storyville prostitutes, the description has a static and repetitive quality. The asyndeton, alliteration, verbless sentences, and multiple noun phrases transform the absent photographs into mechanically reproduced verbal copies of a lost auratic presence.72 The focus in these verbal images on objects, on the nakedness of the women and on the barrenness of their surroundings resonates with the instrumentalism and metaphoricity of

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optical representation: having been reduced to and commodified into objects of pleasure, the women have become the objects of the spectatorial gaze in Bellocq’s photographs. The anonymous and universal appellation “lady” has evacuated their singular presence; the static poses with furniture and pets have fixed the women along the clichéd range of “the virgin” and “the whore.” However, this initial opticization is challenged by Bellocq’s approach to taking the pictures. As mentioned earlier, Bolden’s visually present picture is hapticized through its detailed and dynamic development; the act of photographing the jazzman and his band is never recounted. In contrast, with the photographs of the prostitutes, both the final result and the photographic process are verbally rendered. Through this simultaneous emphasis on the photographic copy and the original scene, Ondaatje restores not only the auratic value of the photographs, as Sims observes,73 but also the material presence of these women: One snap to quickly catch her scorning him and then waiting, waiting for minutes so she would become self-conscious towards him and the camera and her status, embarrassed at just her naked arms and neck and remembers for the first time in a long while the roads she imagined she could take as a child. And he photographed that. What you see in his pictures is her mind jumping that far back to when she would dare to imagine the future, parading with love or money on a beautiful anonymous cloth arm. Remembering all that as she is photographed by the cripple who is hardly taller than his camera stand.74

Similarly to the photograph of Bolden’s band, these pictures acquire fluidity, a film reel of present hopes and past experiences; their time-image quality evades the prejudiced optical interpretation of a prostitute’s life. In contrast to the short, clipped sentences of Bellocq’s clicking camera capturing the women into metaphorical representations of sin, the predominance of the conjunction “and” lends these images fluidity and conveys the co-existence of different temporal layers. The multiple possible histories triggered off by temporal simultaneity present the reader with a more intimate look at those absenced from official records or those represented in clichéd terms. Rather than being simply part of the plot or an obstacle in the unraveling of the detective story, these multisensory, fluid, and hetero-temporal photographs confirm the singular existence of the portrayed women, which is empowering rather than debilitating. The dissolution of optical representation and the exposure of its limits are most emphatically performed by Bellocq’s acts of “romanticization”:

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Michael Ondaatje Some of the pictures have knife slashes across the bodies. Along the ribs. Some of them neatly decapitate the head of the naked body with scratches. These exist alongside the genuine scars mentioned before, the appendix scar and other non-surgical. They reflect each other, the eye moves back and forth. The cuts add a three-dimensional quality to each work. Not just physically, though you can almost see the depth of the knife slashes, but also because you think of Bellocq wanting to enter the photographs, to leave his trace on the bodies.75

Not unlike Huffman’s attempt to approximate the object of his photographs, Bellocq shortens the distance between him and the women he photographs by making the picture as vulnerable and mutilated as the posing woman and he are (being hydrocephalic, Bellocq has motor disabilities). Thus, his initially static and objectifying photographs become tangible entities through the injuries inflicted on them. By physically engaging with the pictures, Bellocq succeeds in hapticizing the superficial engagement of the initially optical eye with the sitter; now, it will start looking at the photograph in depth and move “back and forth” between artifact and woman. Similarly to Lewis Hines’s photographs, referred to in In the Skin of a Lion, Bellocq’s photos are like “windows”76 through which one can walk, windows which betray official History and normative representation. The gashes of Bellocq’s knife mirror the scars on his own and the women’s bodies, as well as the gaps left in historical records and highlighted by Ondaatje’s text. These slashed photographs defy the immutability of Art and indicate the vulnerability of haptic art. They also approximate Deleuze’s time-images by invoking simultaneously a cluster of temporal planes: childhood dreams are blended with stark reality, present with the futurity of a past moment, a scar with the physicality of a knife slash. The repudiation of optical representation is most potently conveyed by Ondaatje’s rendition of Buddy Bolden’s own artistic practice. Echoing Bellocq’s photography, which seeps into his and the prostitutes’ ontology, Bolden’s jazz cannot be contained within the diegetic layer or even to one sensory modality. Its haptic potential is signaled early on in Coming through Slaughter with the two pictorial instances being infused with the idea of sound and music: the sonographs are visual representations of sounds and the photograph is of sound-makers. Furthermore, Bolden’s diverse occupations — as a cornet player, an editor of a gossip newspaper, a barber — are informed by music and noise, just as most of the narrator’s investigation is based on interviews, recordings, gossip, and reels. Even though conventionally sound and music are defined by their unfolding in time rather than space, Laura Marks has suggested that similarly to the visual, auditory perception can be discussed as having a tactile — and hence haptic — dimension:

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Of course we cannot literally touch sound with our ears, just as we cannot touch images with our eyes; but as vision can be optical or haptic, so too hearing can perceive the environment in a more or less instrumental way. We listen for specific things, while we hear ambient sound as an undifferentiated whole. One might call “haptic hearing” that usually brief moment when all sounds present themselves to us undifferentiated, before we make the choice of which sounds are most important to attend to.77

With reference to sound, opticity is characterized by the instrumental separation of meaningful units, or what Marks calls the recognized elements of dominant discourse. Aural hapticity, according to the critic, encompasses the perception of undifferentiated music, speech, sound, or noise, a blend which may not have a pre-determined cognitive value. In this sense it will appear to approximate, although not equate, the sounds represented in the middle sonograph of Coming through Slaughter — displaying simultaneously echolocation clicks and squawks. This sonograph conveys the multiple nature of an auditory ambience which consists of meaning-making sounds and “noise.” But unlike Marks’s definition of haptic hearing, the sonograph has not only registered but also categorized these two varieties of sounds, thus differentiating between them and ascribing them a meta-meaning. Reminiscent of the ambivalence of Bolden’s music — yearning for order as well as being obsessed with what is beyond it — the hapticity of this middle sonograph does not exclude but stubbornly returns to the orderly, instrumental, and differentiated optical perception of sound. Hence Buddy’s improvisations would be diametrically opposed to any form of “capture” (visual or auditory), in a way echoing Billy’s resistance to being “frozen” in still photographs. With no past to his name — also exemplified in the uncertainty around his date of birth in the biography included in the last section of Coming through Slaughter78 — Bolden was “[b]orn at the age of twenty-two,”79 when he walks into fame by playing at a parade. His music has no beginning or end, revealing instead “all the possibilities in the middle of the story.”80 As Frank Lewis points out, it is impossible to capture such multiplicities into “wax history,”81 and similarly, Coming through Slaughter insistently resists becoming a murderous (optical) recording — “Laughing in my room. As you try to explain me I will spit you, yellow, out of my mouth.”82 Although it may appear that the book starts in a linear fashion, the writerly nature of the text implies that Ondaatje’s “soup” has actually started in the middle,83 leaving all the possibilities open for rumors, legends, testimonies, photographs, interviews, and memories. Just as Bolden’s audiences can “come in where they pleased and leave when they pleased and somehow hear the germs of the start and all the possible

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endings at whatever point in the music,”84 Coming through Slaughter has left the “window” of representation open for the reader to join anytime. Buddy’s haptic art — multiple and fluid — resists the straitjacketing norms of optical representation and the encroachments of conventional morality. A witness to Buddy’s performance is perturbed yet mesmerized by the blasphemous “mixing [of] the Devil’s music with His music.”85 Bolden’s jazz brings about a sense of fear and revulsion in the listener; his performance also transforms a conventionally distant art such as music into an affective experience, and transports Dude Botley — the aural witness — into sensually infused recollections of his mother’s hymns in church and the sinners’ dancing in the park. The perverse ambivalence of such hapticized art is simultaneously appealing and disgusting to his sensibilities, whose epistemological anchors are threatened with dissolution. Tuning into the music and denouncing it as blasphemous, acting simultaneously as its accomplice and its judge, the listener/reader/perceiver of such an art oscillates between the optical and haptic end of the spectrum, reminiscent of Kristeva’s conclusion with reference to the experience of abjection, which “neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law.”86 The discomforting effect of this pleasurable infection is most emphatically invoked during Bolden’s walk down the embankment among the pox-ridden and mutilated mattress whores. If the music Dude Botley describes transgresses boundaries by transforming itself into dancing flesh of lust and promiscuity, the same music is seen by Buddy as oozing from the deformed and leaking bodies of these women “drummed back [. . .] by your rich sticks and rich laws.”87 Bellocq’s mutilation of the photographs of the Storyville prostitutes has become a literal deformation of the bodies of the mattress whores; the ocular objectification of their corporeality is enacted physically by pimps and clients. Broken limbs and infected genitals — cumulatively compressed in the racialized appellation “gypsy foot”88 — embody in a visceral way the historical exclusion of the “remnants of the good life good time ever loving Storyville”89 and the abjection with these reminders of poverty and disease. The ineluctable presence of these women will be normally enveloped by the mist and darkness of historical amnesia, or violently removed by the hunting sticks of “pimp” historians and “dangerously healthy” mainstream representations. Impossible to describe and unbearable to contemplate, the mattress whores’ pictures are burnt by Bellocq, while Bolden abstains from giving them any sympathy — “[t]here is no horror in the way they run their lives.”90 The sobriety of his narration mirrors the hunger and paucity of the women; the refusal to depict them in detail enacts the resistance to redemptive acts of artistic sublimation. Confronted with the stark barrenness and unapologetic pathology of the “gypsy foot” existence, Bolden’s brain gets “a

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mattress strapped to its back,”91 and thus approximates without abstracting (or cleansing) their abjectness. The climactic scene in the book, Bolden’s last parade, is the ultimate example of Bolden’s haptic art of affective discomfort. Joining Henry Allen’s march band, Buddy starts off his play at a distance from the crowd. With the appearance of an unknown dancing girl, in whom Bolden sees “Robin, Nora, Crawley’s girl’s tongue,”92 squawks emerge from his cornet gradually quickening the tempo, losing clear-cut melody and number, and becoming an undifferentiated sound. The girl’s tantalizing dance offers a tactile translation of the music, “hitting each note with her body before it is even out” at the same time as Buddy feels that “something’s fallen in [his] body.”93 The subsequent cinematic sequence replays the assemblage of affect and sensation that constitutes Buddy’s haptic act — as if in a quick-cadence loop, conveyed by the lack of punctuation or pronominal reference. After the jazzman’s final declaration — “this is what I wanted, always, loss of privacy in the playing” — organs, senses, and subjectivities frantically intermingle like a “mad parade,” “the music still pouring in a roughness I’ve never hit, watch it listen it listen it, can’t see i can’t see.”94 The art of Coming through Slaughter, similarly to Bellocq’s photography, offers “mole comfort, mole deceit.”95 This art, like a window intimate and tactile, defies being “watched by others” and focuses instead on the “owned pain” and experience of and with the body.96 Come with me Webb I want to show you something, no come with me I want to show you something. You come too. Put your hand through this window.97

If at the end the narrator seems to have arrived at the point of his departure — the same streets, stores, and houses, bleached colors, and subdued sounds reign in Bolden’s neighborhood — it is because the passage through the window of hapticity does not illuminate or enlighten; but it does have “teeth in it.”98 If it explained everything, such an art would be optical and act like the violent sun from The Collected Works, draining the colors of life, reading the “black and white photograph, part of a history book”99 as a reference to an external historical reality. An optical art cannot engage with Buddy’s fluidity, whose corpse leaks out with the underground waters of the Holtz Cemetery; nor can it relate to the fullness of the Storyville prostitutes’ lives, which it would reduce to the black-and-whiteness of normative morality. A haptic art, on the other hand, engages intimately without trying to grasp; it caresses the slashes and gaps without offering a cure; it reminds one of the scars of violent optical knowledge and the omissions of History writing.

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Humble Affections of the Cinematic: Michael Ondaatje’s Films of the 1970s In a 1975 interview with Sam Solecki, Michael Ondaatje gestured towards the liminality of his aesthetic agenda by discussing The Collected Works as “the film [he] couldn’t afford to shoot.”100 By then the Canadian writer had already tried his hand at cinematography with the documentaries Sons of Captain Poetry and The Clinton Special, and the silent slapstick, Carry on Crime and Punishment. The films, however, had not met with critical acclaim. To some critics, the cinematic ventures “indicat[ed] little imaginative engagement with the formal potentials of the medium,”101 with most merit being attributed to the scenes where Ondaatje’s “attuned” literary sensibilities came to the fore.102 To others the flaws lay in Ondaatje’s lack of overt political commitment as well as excessive investment in the mythologization of the artistic self.103 Those who discerned some worth in the films did so by tracing thematic (and occasionally formal) continuities between Ondaatje’s works in the two mediums,104 somewhat defying the author’s self-proclaimed interest in film as an escape from the verbosity of language;105 and these perceived literary and cinematic overlaps subsequently became transformed into discussions about Ondaatje’s diegetic and extradiegetic fascination with rewriting, editing, and communal authorship.106 Following the analysis of Ondaatje’s haptic writing, this section analyses the continuities between Ondaatje’s literary and cinematic works not so much in terms of the writer’s overly ambitious relapse into an artistic medium beyond his expertise but rather as evidence of his sustained interest in a particular kind of aesthetics — the haptic — which has, albeit implicitly, political and ethical underpinnings. The emphasis on the materiality of language as an opaque experience rather than as a transparent vehicle runs through the three films. With Sons of Captain Poetry and Carry on Crime and Punishment the withdrawal from the belief in the transparency of language is conveyed through their minimal reliance on “meaningful” words: Carry on Crime and Punishment is an imitation of silent chase-genre films popular at the turn of the twentieth century, while Sons of Captain Poetry focuses on the Canadian concrete poet bpNichol, drawing attention to perceptual features of language, such as intonation, pitch, and rhythm. In addition, with their emphasis on the slippage between real and performed experience, the films raise a number of questions about representation. Like Ondaatje’s literary works, they testify to his artistic indebtedness to the postmodern — indeed, features such as polyvocal and open-ended narrative, intertextuality and self-reflectivity, and blurred boundaries between fact and fiction, as well as between reader, author, and text, inform both the aesthetics and the contents

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of the literary and filmic texts. While it may be argued that the Canadian context of the three films lends Ondaatje’s oeuvre an air of historicity,107 the national theme never outstrips the personal. Ondaatje the filmographer, not unlike Ondaatje the writer, prefers to frame his interest in more intimate terms, as Bart Testa points out: The Clinton Special extends affection to all parties involved; its critique of representation is gentle and appreciative. Ondaatje has the tact and humility not to assign a position of superior knowledge to himself or his viewer, which is the common temptation of the documentary filmmaker.108

It is my argument that the critical affection and humility of Ondaatje’s films is informed by the same quality of proximity and materiality that characterizes the haptic aesthetics of his literary works. Open-ended, processual, and experiential, Ondaatje’s acts of cinematic representation rely on mutuality and contact, materiality and contiguity. The haptic map of Ondaatje’s film art unfolds in proximity to and among those involved in the creative process; epistemological boundaries collapse and in the consequent experience of vulnerability a feeling of mutual appreciation can arise — appreciation both affective and affectionate. Sons of Captain Poetry — a 29-minute film portrait of Ondaatje’s fellow Canadian bpNichol — is executed in the documentary tradition, comprising footage and photographs from bp’s life, interviews, and performances.109 Ondaatje’s editing and montage decisions have allowed the writer-turned-cinematographer to achieve a particular imaginative quality in the work, which transcends the merely reproductive nature of documentary films. One can feel that personal friendship and praise are an indelible part of this project;110 for even though bp is singled out as the principal subject of enquiry (the hero of the story), the form of the film conveys a sense of ordinary, rather than extraordinary, heroism. For example, bp is seen casually reclining on a mattress while talking to Ondaatje, drinking beer, and “thinking” in the frame; in his turn, Ondaatje, bp’s interlocutor, lets his hand enter the frame as he reaches for a beer. This intimacy is reinforced by what bp delineates as a major concern of his art, which clearly reverberates with Ondaatje’s own work: My concern is to somehow teach what I see as the validity of having as many perceptual systems available to you as possible; that this is the only way to really survive in a world in which the insistence on one level of meaning has become paramount.111

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The recovery of the material side of language which connects the individual to the universe, and which restores the synchronous vibration of individual sounds with the body of the entire world, is the main task of bp’s concrete poetry. His conceptualization of perception, however, does not single out any particular sense modality; on the contrary, following Marshall McLuhan, bp rejects the prevalence of one perceptual system (for example, vision) over the rest of the sensorium. The movement through different systems of perception that Nichol talks about in Ondaatje’s documentary resounds with one of the most frequently recurring images in the film — that of the window. Sons of Captain Poetry opens and closes with a dark, unrecognizable silhouette climbing through a giant smashed window, bathed in purple lighting. The window, in particular the broken window, is not a new image in Ondaatje’s inventory. Usually accompanied by a violent artistic figure (be it Billy the Kid or Buddy Bolden), the destruction of a window or a mirror comes to stand for the disrupted wholeness and transparency of representation. In The Collected Works, Billy sees his death in the “screen of a horse’s eye;”112 likewise, in Coming through Slaughter, the narrator’s arm pushes through the mirror of representation to reach for the real Buddy and eventually invites the reader to go through this window with teeth in it. The lost intactness of windows and the passage through mirrors, therefore, act as potent meta-comments on the liminality of art and the permeability of the boundaries between fact and fiction. Nonetheless, Ondaatje recognizes, as Claude Gandelman has argued, that the encounter between the worlds of art and reality is always partial and the line between the two simultaneously elusive and impossible to obliterate. [I]t is a question that we perpetually leave aside, never trying to enter this door which designates fictional existence and its liminality. That actually means our never being really able to “penetrate” a text because then the illusion of fiction and art would no longer be effective. Fiction itself is the liminal — and vectorial — entering of a text through a door that is never designated by name.113

Gandelman is here promoting a surface rather than an in-depth engagement with a text, a kind of resistance to the forceful penetration of the fictional world and a more oblique (“vectorial”) engagement with a text which will preserve its opacity (and that of its subjects). The transformation of the window into a brick wall in the second part of Sons of Captain Poetry reinforces this emphasis on opacity. Drawn out of a larger urban setting, full of noises and sights, the brick wall is uncannily blank. Its materiality contrasts sharply with the abstract signifiers in the urban space as well as with the transparency of the window; moreover, its physicality invokes the material

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nature of concrete poetry and, by extension, the opacity of representation. The window motif is also informed by the desire to reproduce an overall photographic effect, Ondaatje’s aim being “that each shot would almost be a static photograph.”114 Thus, while bp recounts his family history in a voiceover, his family photographs appear in a series of close-ups, a technique Ondaatje also applies to The Collected Works and the memoir Running in the Family. Watching through crevices, comic strips, and other rectangular shapes suggests framing, which by virtue of its indexical nature enhances the sense of shared materiality between artifact and viewer. The heavy editing of Sons of Captain Poetry is informed by a similar desire to reproduce an overall photographic effect: indexical signs of bp’s life and surroundings, the cinematically edited photographs also convey the physicality of the cut. Resounding with the time-image quality of the photographs in The Collected Works and Coming through Slaughter — photographs that are testimonials to an absence but also to a tangible presence — Sons of Captain Poetry seeks to enhance the sense of the opaque liminality of art. With The Clinton Special, the other major cinematic project by Ondaatje, the boundary between art and reality is explored through the focus on documentary theater. The Clinton Special is a 71-minute film commemorating the 1973 revival of a canonical Canadian documentary play, The Farm Show, originally performed in August 1972. The prehistory of The Farm Show project is given in the opening scenes of Ondaatje’s film: the Toronto-based troupe of Theatre Passe Muraille, led by director Paul Thompson, made a play about the residents of Clinton, Ontario, after having researched and lived with the farming community for six weeks. Unlike traditional theater, The Farm Show had no script for the actors and actresses to follow; rather, they created their own lines and improvised by observing and interacting with the local residents, the aim being “to document experience rather than facts.”115 At the same time, Theatre Passe Muraille’s style was characterized by a high degree of theatricality, usually involving “non-realistic presentational techniques” and “gestural story-telling,” which “freed [it] from naturalistic portraiture.”116 This self-referentiality was further heightened by the troupe’s reliance on their audience’s response to their acting. After six weeks of research and rehearsals, the Theatre Passe Muraille troupe performed in a local barn for the Clinton community they were impersonating. Without dramatic text to guide it or significant props to build the theatrical illusion, the performance was processual, physical, and self-conscious; what the spectators responded to was theatricality, not a general, abstract idea. There was, therefore, an interesting mirroring to be observed — and which was accordingly filmed by Ondaatje. On the one hand, the farmers had to recognize themselves as scripted and performed by the Theatre Passe Muraille

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troupe; on the other, the actors did not have complete control over the final product. On the contrary, watching the response of the spectators, they were alarmed that the mirror image they offered might be distorted and offensive. The type of realism the troupe and their director were looking for depended very much on the personal contact between those performing and those performed, and on the negotiable nature of the performance as a whole. The simultaneous presence of the real-life farmers and their theatrical impersonations in the barn where the play was initially staged was to Thompson the ultimate creative act: bringing together life and art. And Ondaatje’s film cinematically echoes Thompson’s project. Executed along the lines of the documentary tradition, The Clinton Special records — using primarily long takes and static camera — the research, rehearsal, and performance of the revival of the show, complementing it with interviews of Clinton residents and Theatre Passe Muraille troupe members. With the filming of the revival performance, The Clinton Special aims to replicate the defamiliarizing effect of Thompson’s live performance. While the farmers watch themselves being performed by the Toronto actors, the film viewers watch the farmers and the performance, thus becoming yet another layer in the exchange of optical control. The authentic and the fictional are intimately intertwined: the actors’ performance is not totally fictional, as it is the result of their personal experiences with those watching them play. The audience of the play is authentic but also self-conscious, owing to being impersonated by the actors on stage. What the viewer of Ondaatje’s film is left with is the illusion of a distanced, objective, and almost omniscient position, observing the farmers as themselves (in their interviews on location), as the impersonations of the actors (both on stage and on location) and as spectators (in the barn). While this omniscient position equates viewer with director, it also undermines the purported distance between art and reality. Bringing together everyday experience and theatrical impersonation, as well as character, spectator, and author, the filming of Thompson’s production replays a major consideration of Ondaatje’s writing. It breaks away from traditional notions of mimetic reproduction of reality to give way to an experiential and self-conscious art cum reality, a haptic art. The formal techniques of this film are as crucial as they are to Sons of Captain Poetry. Although the rhythm is different, the alternate shots of performances on stage with documentary-style interviews with actors and farmers bring to the fore the fact/fiction interplay that interests both Thompson and Ondaatje. A memorable sequence of interview and performance is the one of Les Jervis and his impersonation by David Fox: instead of providing a continuity type of montage, in which the narrative will be driven forward, the Jervis/Fox sequence covers the same event by repeating

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gestures and expressions, and thus drawing the viewer into reflection about the nature of art and reality. Resembling the double-take and crosscutting montage employed by Ondaatje in the narration of The Collected Works and Coming through Slaughter, the dialogue between these images does not establish “the true” version of the story, but rather exemplifies a simultaneity of equally falsifying narratives. While most characters/farmers present themselves in Ondaatje’s documentary, there is one notable exception, Charlie Wilson, who, like Billy in The Collected Works, is absent from and yet mediated in The Clinton Special. Dead at the time of the project, Charlie is given substance by people’s stories about him — about his shack, nervous tic, occupation, habits, favorite TV show, and his death. These accounts are interspersed with excerpts from Charlie’s letter to a friend, the mediation this time being conveyed through self-representation rather than representation by others. Charlie’s presence is visually mediated by the image of the shack where he lived, the tools he used, and his silhouette writing the aforementioned letter; but it is also aurally mediated by an actor’s voiceover reading excerpts from the letter. The viewer is again in a quasi-omniscient position hearing about Charlie as represented by others and listening to “Charlie” reading a letter — a position not dissimilar from the one to be assumed by Billy’s reader in The Collected Works. Likewise, fact and fiction intersect, sources are undermined, intimacy and contact become paramount. The various faces and voices that supply the viewer with information about Charlie approximate a patchwork of rumors, which undermines the veracity of their accounts. Unlike “the others” defied by Billy, however, the farmers’ accounts in The Clinton Special are represented as much more adequate in the performance of their testimonial task. Having known Charlie intimately, his fellow farmers cannot help disclosing their warmth for him. At the same time, the sepia effect of the lighting used while Charlie’s letter is being read and when the landscape of his life is being filmed makes clear the documentary nature of the episodes. Although Ondaatje’s artistic decisions as far as filters and lighting are concerned may not always be deliberate or consistent,117 the faded color of the sepia in the Charlie Wilson episodes heightens the sense of Charlie’s liminality and the ambiguity of representation. Similar to The Collected Works, this episode concludes with an open frame — the door to Charlie’s shack. Like Billy, Charlie refuses to be known completely and from a distance; his opacity is preserved through the material traces of his existence and the personal accounts of those that have known him intimately. The last image of The Clinton Special condenses the message of both Thompson’s play and Ondaatje’s film: a huge rectangular structure, in deus ex machina fashion, descends from the ceiling towards the troupe,

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surrounding them and producing a frame-like effect. Hovering over the boundary between a mirror and a portrait, a photograph and a cinematic frame, this scene reiterates the impossibility of containing reality and art in separate frameworks. Ondaatje’s oeuvre is replete with images of photographs coming to life, paintings being penetrated, films spilling into reality. In The Clinton Special the bodies of the actors and actresses come out of the frame, just as their performance has spilled into the life of the Clinton community. It is through the intimacy of their contact with the community, and the mutual exchange with the audience made possible by their performance, that the Theatre Passe Muraille actors succeeded in their humble recreation of real lives. In line with the haptic trend in Ondaatje’s literary works, his filmic oeuvre also respects the opacity and tangibility of its surroundings without hiding its own constructed nature.

Chapter 2

Haptic Aesthetics and Witness Writing

The specific task of the literary testimony is [. . .] to open up in that belated witness, which the reader now historically becomes, the imaginative capability of perceiving history — what is happening to others — in one’s own body, with the power of sight (insight) usually afforded only by one’s own immediate physical involvement. SHOSHANA FELMAN1

A witness, as critical analyses conclude,2 falls under a double bind: on the one hand, the necessity to bear just testimony to an unascertainable event, and the demand to testify in compliance with the current episteme, on the other. Thus, if testimony is provided, and is called for, when the facts upon which justice must pronounce its verdict are not clear, when historical accuracy is in doubt, and when both the truth and its supporting elements of evidence are called into question,3

one is faced by an overwhelming crisis of truth, coupled with what Jean-François Lyotard has called “the incommensurability of language games” — the discrepancy among irreducibly different discourses, which resists the adjudication of ultimate justice and the postulation of a grand narrative.4 Bringing together the ontological and epistemological uncertainty of postmodernity, and the urge for viable historicization, the act of witnessing entails not only the access to a truth but also the begetting thereof.5 For all its resistance to comprehension and narration, however, testimony does not lead to historical amnesia; as Cathy Caruth concludes, [t]he act of refusal [. . .] is therefore not a denial of knowledge of the past, but rather a way of gaining access to a knowledge that has not yet attained the form of “narrative memory.” In its resistance to the platitudes of knowledge, this refusal opens up the space for a testimony that can speak beyond what is already understood. [. . .] The refusal of understanding is also a fundamentally creative act.6

Slipping away from epistemological frames of reference and being uncontainable within conventional linguistic structures, testimony begets a different

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truth and a processual language. Attempting to access an irretrievable reality, a witness, Shoshana Felman points out, creatively rediscovers the testimonial power of language by passing through its vulnerability and muteness.7 Bearing witness, thus, according to Marianne Hirsch, invokes both “the act of holding — caring, protective, and nurturing” and the “historical withholding that does not absorb the other.”8 Intimacy is at the heart of such an ethical understanding of witnessing as care extended towards others. Contact with different temporal-spatial realities can, like a physical witness, bring an unreachable event into presence. The indexical function — defined by contiguity rather than resemblance and which, “like a pronoun demonstrative or relative, forces the attention to the particular object intended without describing it”9 — instead of discursively supplementing the already available knowledge, becomes an uneasy witness to the difficulty of narrating incommensurable experiences. Insofar as the indexical is metonymic rather than metaphorical, demonstrative rather than explanatory, it shares with the haptic the emphasis on texture, surface, and surround, and the suspicion towards verbosity and omniscience. Enhancing the missing indexical contact between the reader’s (in)sight and an unattainable event conveyed on the page, haptic writing can rekindle the testimonial function of literature that Shoshana Felman refers to. As discussed in Chapter 1, through a number of haptic features — physical design of the book, as well as formal features and content — the cultural artifact can become “sticky” with affect, moving the reader as well as connecting one reader to another.10 Breaking down the boundaries between self and other, and contesting the notion of the unitary rational subject, the haptic writing I have been exploring does not merely represent a historical or psychological reality. Its self-reflective nature (conscious of his location and the limits it imposes on his stance, in the two texts discussed in this chapter Ondaatje reiterates his or his narrators’ implication in the hegemonic episteme) transforms the cultural product into a witnessing act bearing witness to the witness. The haptic thrust into the multisensory is able to trace alternative tactile and affective epistemologies that bypass the cognitive without debunking it completely. Ondaatje’s texts thus contemplate — and enact — art forms which are affected by and which themselves affect the body. In addition to physical proximity intimacy entails emotional attachment as well. And here lies the paradox of the testimonial imperative to bear witness both to the cognitive truth of an event (its integration into the epistemological parameters of the age) — which would require critical distance — as well as to the phenomenological truth of an event (its perception by participants) — which would demand proximity to those implicated in it. Here also lies another ambivalence about the historiographic value of testimonial accounts:

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while providing additional context (by recounting a witness’s response to or experience of an event), they lack factual objectivity (due to the affective investment of the witness in the event or in other participants). At the same time, the witness’s implication in the recounted event can alert their readers, listeners or historians (witnesses to the witness) to both listen attentively and assume responsibility11 — responsibility to hear a different kind of history, but also responsibility to account for their own implication in, relation to, and situatedness vis-à-vis the textualized event. For as critics have pointed out, current cultural valorization of memory and trauma has more often than not resulted in a misguided listening to testimonial narratives — listening driven by the desire to be sympathetic and identify with the victim.12 To avoid such reductive and appropriative moves, the attentive listener has to be both open to the affective charge of the testimony and yet resistant to its identificatory pull; to have a feeling for an other without feeling they are the other; to hold and withhold.13 In his two “Sri Lankan texts” to be discussed in this chapter, Ondaatje presents this “other” way of attentive listening to histories he did or could not know, a way that differs from the “staged” representations of official archives and the media, a way that rehabilitates the historiographic value of the intimate, the corporeal and the caressing. Running in the Family presents Ondaatje’s account of his family in Sri Lanka (and ancestors in colonial Ceylon) as well as the process of its construction from anecdotes, archives, and memories. Likewise, Anil’s Ghost deals with Anil’s return to war-torn Sri Lanka, which encompasses not only her (and by extension Ondaatje’s) distant and impartial scrutiny of the civil war and its casualties, but also her emergence as an embodied witness that offers comfort to bodies indiscriminately abused as evidence or weapons. Both texts therefore weave an intimate rather than evidentiary map, a document with a soul, a history with a body, which is also subtly political, as Ondaatje points out in an interview with Linda Hutcheon: I wanted to establish a kind of map; I wanted to make clear that this was just part of a long tradition of invasions and so forth. So the map and the history and the poetry made a more social voice, became the balance to the family story, the other end of the see-saw.14

These accounts draw their affective charge from the proximity of their narrators to the events, characters, or settings described; Anil and Michael are not merely the detached subject writing the biography of a family or the history of a country, but individuals who have “witnessed everything,” who “would wake and just smell things” and “had to select senses.”15 Implicated

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physically and emotionally in the structures of family and country, Anil’s and Michael’s impartiality is compromised; and even if genealogy can lend their witnessing acts a level of authenticity, their diasporic affiliations erode it. In this complex dialectics between proximity and distance, Ondaatje invites the reader of Running in the Family and Anil’s Ghost — even though distanced from the events recounted in the books — to take part in the testimonial acts by bearing witness to a witness and by questioning their own witness position. In line with Dori Laub’s assertion about the dialogic nature of testimony, “[t]estimonies are not monologues; they cannot take place in solitude. The witnesses are talking to somebody,”16 Ondaatje’s texts look for and construct a particular kind of witness and a reader as witness.17 Unlike most psychoanalytic analyses of testimony as therapeutic, Ondaatje’s witness writing does not propose that bearing witness will cure or “right wrongs” in any conventional sense.18 Rather, by offering no pragmatic solution, cathartic resolution or artistic sublimation, his writing “speaks through” the traces of its surroundings, makes the hitherto unheard stories “shareable” yet “indigestible,” and thus asserts the potential of the intimate to disrupt hegemonic narratives in an ethical way. Running in the Family sustains the trend of Ondaatje’s generic transgressions and formal experimentation; partaking of a variety of literary forms — autobiography, biography, non-fiction novel, and travel memoir among others — the work has been interpreted as enacting the writer’s interstitial dwelling amidst different ontological realities. On the one hand, this in-betweenness has constituted the target of critical attacks against Ondaatje, accusing him of “foregrounding the ‘narrative’ at the expense of the ‘national,’”19 and of “reluctance or inability to place his family in a network of social relationships.”20 On the other hand, these formal ambiguities have been ascribed a political and ethical dimension: both as “threaten[ing] the legitimating strategies of those who invest in homogenous readings of culture and nation,”21 and as resisting realist conventions in life writing and historiography in the decentered age of postmodernity.22 I discuss Running in the Family as exploring the affective dimensions and ethical ramifications of haptic witness writing. Without giving priority to an original instance or a primary witness, Ondaatje defines the testimonial aspect of Running in the Family as fictional, performative, intimate, and collective: A literary work is a communal act. [. . .] While all these names may give an air of authenticity, I must confess that the book is not a history but a portrait or “gesture.” And if those listed above disapprove of the fictional air I apologize and can only say that in Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.23

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Echoing the Credits of Coming through Slaughter, where “real names and characters and historical situations [. . .] have been expanded or polished to suit the truth of fiction,”24 the (auto)biographical memoir, with its blend of documentary evidence, unrecorded gossip, flitting dreams, and gossamer hallucinations, resembles Buddy Bolden’s newspaper The Cricket, which “respected stray facts, manic theories, and well-told lies.”25 At the same time, as a kind of “pail of sub-history,”26 Running in the Family is described as the outcome of a communal effort, into which Ondaatje, his siblings, and relatives in Sri Lanka and Canada all have input. A subsequent reference to one of the epigraphs in In the Skin of a Lion asserts that “[n]o story is ever told just once”27 and thus effectively summarizes the political and ethical ramifications of the text: it will not constitute another “history but a portrait or ‘gesture.’” The author’s unwillingness to designate the book as a version of History is reminiscent of his refusal to fill in the empty frame of Billy the Kid’s missing photograph and of his spotlight on the “pail” of historically excised lives in Bolden’s New Orleans. Defining the text as both a portrait and a gesture indicates the intimate approach of Ondaatje’s quest (it is a portrait as opposed to a landscape), as well as its synesthetic quality (it is a written, not drawn, portrait). Moreover, if the word “gesture” suggests that this portrait will be executed with the intimacy of touch, the indexical qualities of a gesture and typographical markers (inverted commas) around the word “gesture” in the quotation imply that this is a portrait self-conscious of its constructed nature and epistemological limits. Concluding the book with the admission of failure, “But the book again is incomplete,”28 Ondaatje asserts that the text as a testimonial account of others bears witness to its own invention and allows for further interventions; the lack of closure and absence of any claim of ownership — “the book” as opposed to “my book” — reinforce the communal and multiple nature of the artifact (“again” implies that Ondaatje’s attempt to complete it is one of many). If the result of Ondaatje’s visits in 1978 and 1980 is an account which bears witness to the importance of intimacy in history writing and to Ondaatje’s own writing as a creative witnessing act, Anil’s trip as presented in Anil’s Ghost is permeated by profound disappointment with political structures. The political stance of the novel, not unlike that of Running in the Family, has produced a spate of critical responses, debating the viability of Ondaatje’s investment in the local and interpersonal,29 the bias in his treatment of Sinhala Buddhism,30 and the political potential of an ethical relation with otherness.31 And while I agree that the subject matter of Anil’s Ghost, as well as Ondaatje’s complex positioning as a Sri Lankan-Canadian celebrity writer, inevitably politicize his pronouncements on the personal and the identitarian, the private and the historical, I also argue that intimacy is

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foregrounded in the novel as a non-appropriative approach to others, as an enabling epistemological tool and form of witness writing that lends these others agency while self-reflectively acknowledging its own limitations. The close-up on the corporeal in Anil’s Ghost conveys the impossible position of entrapment in war-torn Sri Lanka, a position circumscribed by hegemonic macropolitical discourses, a position that the “long-distance gaze”32 of “visiting journalist[s]”33 cannot discern. Anil’s return to Sri Lanka does not merely provide her with cognitive plenitude, now that the proximal aspect of the migrant’s “stereoscopic vision” is no longer absent;34 the renewed proximity to the place of her birth does not arouse in her patriotic fervor or the guilt of a prodigal returned. Instead, it enables her to engage in a reciprocated act of affectionate witnessing: succumbing to the indexical rather than the symbolical power of her surroundings — human bodies, stone statues, natural habitats — the forensic pathologist comes to bear the imprints of the suffering and pain of those disempowered by political structures. Not only are the victims of the violence in Sri Lanka acknowledged as a material presence, but they can also start bearing witness to themselves, to their stories, to others who have gone unwitnessed. Bearing witness to unwitnessed stories and unacknowledged witnesses becomes an interlinear historiographic act, an intimate gesture of affect, which sidesteps the exigencies of the politics of identitarianism tearing the island apart. Anil’s Ghost is woven around the plot of “witnessing the body” as an epistemological tool for scientific inquiry and successful dissemination of political indoctrination. Discursive formulations of the corporeal alternate between an impenetrable irreducibility that is constantly undergoing mystification and an authentic reflection of internal essence that needs deconstruction.35 One cannot help discerning in such interpretations the stark delineation between an intangible essence (the true self) and a corporeal shell enveloping it. The latter tends to exist in order to shelter the former, albeit in a static, somewhat passive way; however, it is also there to be injured and pierced. A conduit of pain and suffering, corporeality is perceived as a threat to the self, leading to the loss of language, consciousness, and sense of the world. If the heightened sense of physicality raises awareness of human mortality and destructibility, it also leads to the sense of agentlessness. In this sense, as Elaine Scarry points out, the body made acutely present (through torture and even death) is perceived as a traitor of the self; an uncomfortable reminder of the self’s vulnerability, the corporeal becomes the resented member of the Cartesian split that not only circumscribes the self to mere physicality but is also the conduit to the self’s destruction. At the same time, however, Scarry discerns in the body a possible witness to suffering, as the corporeal is capable of lending tangibility to an unshareable sentient experience:

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If the felt-attributes of pain are [. . .] lifted into the visible world, and if the referent for these now objectified attributes is understood to be the human body, then the sentient fact of the person’s suffering will become knowable to a second person.36

Here emerges another type of body, an agentive, interactive presence capable of generating memories where they did not exist in the first place and of offering solace when such seemed unattainable. While the feeling of pain is essentially unobjectifiable,37 Scarry argues that through an emphasis on the body, through the permeation of “the visible” with “the felt” and “the sentient,” the inexpressible can be shared with others. Anil’s Ghost, thus, attends to “the body witnessing,” an enabling act of presencing those that have been silenced by History makers.38 The presencing of the body and presencing through the body affectively detour the instrumentalization of the corporeal. Bodies engaging with other bodies — human, artistic, natural — transcend their ascribed functionality as cognitive instruments and assume the role of active witnesses of difference; they “touch into words”39 what has gone unnoticed and offer the solace of caress where healing is impossible. Ondaatje’s haptic aesthetics, therefore, through its emphasis on the corporeal, the intimate, and the affective, bears witness to the power of the body to presence voices that have been muted by dominant discursive regimes, to enable non-appropriative appreciation of opacity, to offer affectionate caress in the irreparable sutures of macropolitical pressures.

“Touching into words”: The Intimacy of Witness writing in Running in the Family Running in the Family records Ondaatje’s experiences in Sri Lanka in his attempt to uncover his family history. The filiative qualities of the (auto) biographical memoir are hard to ignore, almost suggesting a longing for roots and fixity. However, the pun in that very same title implies that in addition to the genealogical inheritance of features “running in the family,” the act of writing constitutes for the author an accidental “running into the family,” an encounter with a community premised on relation and contiguity, not on descent. Renouncing the preponderance of genealogy, Ondaatje’s history of his family, and by extension the country of his birth, becomes an intimate testimony to the reminiscences of relatives and friends, and to the whispers of records and artifacts. Prevented from being a direct witness to some of these events, Ondaatje reinvents his testimony in the present, attempting to engage with the surviving witnesses of that past. Withholding judgment or sense of

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absolute understanding, his witness writing declares openly its inability to be an omniscient narrative; instead, Running in the Family testifies to the experience of partial witnessing and the opacity of being. One such example is Ondaatje’s father Mervyn, who critical opinion has seen as a main focus of the biographical trajectory of Running in the Family. I argue, however, that it is not the authentic father figure that Ondaatje is after, but rather the process of his rediscovery through writing — a process that takes place in situ. Having not known him in his childhood, Michael is belatedly trying to put together the image of his father by excavating and amalgamating dreams, memories, photographs, anecdotes. The resulting incongruity prevents the reconstruction of a uniform Mervyn; eventually, Ondaatje admits failure in his testimonial undertaking, “There is so much to know and we can only guess.”40 Guessing stray information is presented as more reliable in conveying the truth of character and emotion that Michael cherishes. In contrast to his theatrical mother-in-law Lalla and his wife Doris, Mervyn is a man whose relation to the surroundings is intimate — his “actions were minimal and more private.”41 Rejoicing in his “stadium of small things,”42 Mervyn celebrates privacy, the proximity of grand events brought into the close-up of his immediate surroundings, his friendships, his own body. If Mervyn’s character reflects Ondaatje’s appreciation of the opacity of beings and awareness of the irretrievability of past events, Lalla’s and Doris’s flamboyance embodies the enabling potential of imagination: “An individual would be eternally remembered for one small act that in five years had become so magnified he was just a footnote below it.”43 On the one hand, Ondaatje’s acknowledgement that the record of his family thrives on “well-told lie[s]” rather than factual truth can be read as a challenge to normative representation and its claims for veracity. On the other hand, in contrast to Lalla’s and Doris’s act of recording by exaggeration, which entails magnifying “the act” in a person’s life to the point of turning that person into “a footnote,” Running in the Family bears witness via literary close-ups, which map detail and do not obliterate. What this form of witnessing turns into “a footnote” is that aspect of the personal that feeds into individualist notions of the unitary self; its focus on detail does not isolate to expose “the truth,” but caresses the assemblage of reality and representation, character, author, and reader. In this sense, Mervyn’s final collapse into silence, recounted by his friend Archer, is not merely a sign of regression into solitude and aloofness. The narrative pictures a silence that is an act of intimate communality — “We just stayed there together, silent in the dusk like this, and we were quite happy”44 — a stance which cherishes the particular and the intimate, even against the background of grand narratives such as the Second World War, the JVP Insurgency or the government coup.45

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The family that resurfaces in the (auto)biographical memoir, then, can hardly be defined as a nuclear structure reproduced by extension in the imagined family of the nation; the familial in Ondaatje’s text emerges as a fluid cacophony of voices, images, scents, and textures, rehearsing those favorite Ondaatjean metaphors of the bastard and the mongrel. Such fluid conception of the familial coincides with Marianne Hirsch’s distinction between the “myth of the ideal family” and “the lived reality of family”: while the former is characterized by ahistorical ideologies of power whereby one is subjected to the “family gaze,” the latter is situated in specific historical, social, and economic circumstances wherein one is involved in relational and mutual “family looking.”46 The “family gaze” reflects and reproduces the hegemony of unilateral opticity; in contrast, the mutuality of “family looking” enables reciprocity, albeit within the imminent constraints of the “family gaze.” This is obvious in the photograph of Mervyn and Doris Ondaatje in the section “What We Think of Married Life”:47 in contrast to their photographs in the earlier section “A Fine Romance,”48 where each parent is presented in a somewhat realistic fashion in an individual frame, in the later instance they are brought together in the same photographic space, with Mervyn pulling a semi-idiotic face and Doris posing in a monkey fashion. Unlike the earlier photograph executed in accordance with conventional representation, this latter example breathes the truth of “character and nuance and mood”49 that Ondaatje is after. The familial relationship in this image is not premised on a controlling gaze; rather, the cross-eyed Mervyn and the sideways-looking Doris enact their mutual refusal to subscribe to “the married life” ideology, whereas Michael’s creative intervention — through photographic and other editing — constitutes his own participation in “the family looking.”50 In tune with the carnivalesque quality of his parents, Ondaatje embarks onto his “run into the family” through the medium of dreams. The first one is a self-observation while he is still in Sri Lanka; the second one unfolds in snow-covered Canada just before the return journey starts; and the third one takes place in his uncle’s house in Jaffna. Slipping in between Canadian and Sri Lankan geographies, oneiric and historical realities, private experiences and public events, these dream sequences are counterbalanced by three epigraphs: a map of Sri Lanka marking major cities and sites of interest, and two Orientalist accounts of the island as an exotic place whose inhabitants “thought that the earth was flat.”51 The concluding statement of the prefatory dream sequences, “Half a page — and the morning is already ancient,”52 indicates both the self-reflective and constructed nature of the text in front of us. In contrast to the purportedly factual account by Douglas Amarasekera that equates English language proficiency with the ability to process scientific knowledge, and the narrative of miracle and mystery by the Franciscan friar

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Oderic that pits the exotic place against the “normality” at home, Ondaatje’s line prioritizes the act of writing and its power to affect and effect realities. At the same time, however, this focus on the textual is not divorced from the contextual; the former Dutch Governor’s residence in Jaffna (where one of the dream sequences takes place), coupled with the red color of its walls (reminiscent of blood and violence) and its location in a Tamil-populated province of a Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lanka (symbolical of communal tension), adds context to the private family history that is about to unfurl. Thus, not only is the “running into the family” the lens through which the return to the homeland is experienced, but it is only through the intimate “running into” those structures and imagined communities that their reinvention into more supple and inclusive forms is possible. This already multiple beginning, similarly to the opening of The Collected Works and Coming through Slaughter, is contested by a possible second beginning, which, rather than outlining the start of Ondaatje’s trip to Sri Lanka, points at the historical origins of the Ondaatje family.53 In one and the same chapter — bearing the telling title “Tabula Asiae” — the reader is presented with a verbal translation of a map (different from the one acting as an epigraph that I referred to earlier) and with an abridged history of the island, as well as with the story of the accidental appearance of the Ondaatje name: The island seduced all of Europe. The Portuguese. The Dutch. The English. And so its name changed, as well as its shape,– Serendip, Ratnapida (“island of gems”), Taprobane, Zeloan, Zeilan, Seyllan, Ceilon, and Ceylon — the wife of many marriages, courted by invaders who stepped ashore and claimed everything with the power of their sword or bible or language. This pendant, once its shape stood still, became a mirror. It pretended to reflect each European power till newer ships arrived and spilled their nationalities, some of whom stayed and intermarried — my own ancestor arriving in 1600, a doctor who cured the residing governor’s daughter with a strange herb and was rewarded with land, a foreign wife, and a new name which was a Dutch spelling of his own. Ondaatje. A parody of the ruling language. And when his Dutch wife died, marrying a Sinhalese woman, having nine children, and remaining. Here. At the centre of the rumour. At this point on the map.54

The suggestion of barrenness in the chapter heading clashes with the abundance of wealth that Ceylon stood for in the colonial imagination; at the same time, even though not a terra nullius the island appears to exist only to be plundered, conquered, or settled. This ephemeral quality of colonized Ceylon is reflected in the varied translations of its shape — “[a]moeba, then

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stout rectangle, and then [. . .] a pendant off the ear of India”55 — as well as in the multiplicity of names it has been given.56 Its evolving topography and nomenclature are conveyed via cinematographic dissolves between images of the island and of the first Ondaatjes, and are then linked to colonial mimicry, illegitimacy, and seduction, of which the equally casual Ondaatjes become a pertinent example. History is thus revealed to be not only accidental insofar as Hegelian notions of progress and teleology are concerned, but also selective and interpretive in accordance with the current power balance. Ceylon, named and mapped by its (European) invaders, will eventually lose its allure of exotic difference and become a mere reflection of its conqueror. From an enchanted island of mythical animals, tropical gossip, and excessive rumor, Ceylon metamorphoses — first into a vapid mirror image, and then into a disturbing place, “its outline is the shape of a tear.”57 The transformation gestures at the violent history of the place: a colonial possession plundered by its conquerors, a postcolonial nation-state “torn” in the identitarian politics of communal conflict. Ondaatje has altered the portrait of Ceylon from a decorative item in the colonizer’s crown to an embodied reaction to pain, suffering, and torture. While the fluidity of a tear perpetuates the sense of multiplicity and flux that the first depiction of the island evokes, the indexicality of the description — “Here. [. . .] At this point on the map” — not only calls on the reader to join the re-reading of the island, to be engaged and implicated, but also lends the subjects of the narrative to come a tangible presence. Just as the tear-shaped cartography of Ceylon addresses the embodied way in which colonial history is experienced, the intermingling of the family history of the first Ondaatje with public events in colonial Ceylon illustrates this process in a more specific socio-historical context. Not only is this anonymous ancestor of Michael Ondaatje given a Dutch wife, but he is also rewarded with a Dutch spelling of his name. This translation of the anonymous ancestor into the dominant culture of the colonizer is not an instance of mimicry (unlike Ondaatje’s paternal grandfather Bampa, who “had a weakness for pretending to be ‘English’”58) or colonial assimilation, but a “parody of the ruling language”: Dutch typography may have been used to transcribe the original name, but it has also preserved its foreign opacity.59 Similarly, the ancestor’s “arranged” marriage to a Dutch woman is not construed as a lucrative miscegenation ensuring a leap in the colonial hierarchy, but rather as a prolepsis to the blending of ethnicities on the island, where “[e]veryone was vaguely related and had Sinhalese, Tamil, Dutch, British, and Burgher blood in them.”60 There is implicit criticism of the aloof Europeans and the English, who keep their distance in order to avoid the corruption of their racial purity. The transgression of ethnic and racial endogamy, and norms

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of respectability — implied through the recurrent tropes of miscegenation and seduction — does not refuel exoticizing practices; rather, as Neluka Silva and Ajay Heble observe, it gestures at the oppressiveness of ethnic and national identity politics, and at the possibilities hidden in “a condition of unbelonging.”61 In a similar pattern, the history Ondaatje recreates becomes a mongrel parody of History: unreliable, dialogic, and entangled, it does not subscribe to accepted generic conventions. The superimposition of the intimate onto the public through Ondaatje’s understanding of the familial is reinforced by the detailed account of his first personal memory — the sighting of a pair of kabaragoyas by his mother before he was born.62 This incident acts as a third beginning, but this time of the autobiographical narrative (the other two beginnings being those of the memoir and the biographical narrative, respectively). Following a detailed description of the kabaragoya species, based primarily on historical and scientific sources, this passage recounts a highly improbable personal memory and family myth that have been infiltrated into the official atlas of Ceylonese vertebrae. While it questions the rigid separation between private and public, the incident is also indicative of the overlap between fact and fiction. The location of this anecdote halfway through the book reinforces the non-linear and non-genealogical approach of Ondaatje’s writing; although this is, allegedly, the beginning of the author’s life-story, it is not the beginning of Running in the Family. This is an anecdote about an act of witnessing, but also about the appropriation of this act both by Ondaatje’s narrative and by scientific discourse. Foregrounding the importance of proximity, the author also acknowledges his implication in the appropriation of testimonies; the awareness of such complicity constitutes another kind of witnessing: that of self-consciously bearing witness to the witness. Hence, Ondaatje’s witnessing the testimonies of his family does not involve the linear tracing of histories memorialized in architectural monuments or inscribed in archives; neither does it promise fidelity to the original or a detached observational account. It will rather map the movement of Aunt Phyllis’s eyes roaming over the ceiling while explaining “the original circle of love.”63 Gossip, myths, and anecdotes impregnate the house and flee through the window; nevertheless, the other, the public and monumental, History is never too far away. Just as their house embodies both the colonial history of Ceylon and the private marketplace of the Ondaatjes, where they “trade anecdotes and faint memories,” Ondaatje’s version of family history will include historically validated events such as the race riots and all those that came in contact, intimate and affectionate, with the family. Bringing public History into his relatives’ house, Ondaatje opts for alternative ways of history writing, placed side by side with the official sources. His role in this

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witnessing process, however, is not detached in the tradition of omniscient narratives; rather, located firmly in the pyramid of his family, he is contiguous to their life stories, therefore becoming a metonymical narrator of their testimonies: I see my own straining body which stands shaped like a star and realise gradually I am part of a human pyramid. [. . .] But at this point we are approaching the door which being twenty feet high we will be able to pass through only if the pyramid turns sideways. Without discussing it the whole family ignores the opening and walks slowly through the pale pink rose-coloured walls into the next room.64

Unlike family trees and genealogical hierarchies, this pyramid is not rooted; it staggers at the threshold of the living room — the liminal place of history in the making — and walks through the solid walls of History, embodied in the Governor’s house. Nonetheless, the individual units in the structure are not totally loose: they are linked, probably stretched in the same way as Michael’s body is, amidst familial and generational junctions. This image enacts the entry into the memoir proper: unlike the family of acrobats mentioned earlier in the text, who walk in the mansion by moving sideways,65 the pyramid ignores traditional openings and finds an alternative entryway through the wall. One can discern at this point the rhizomatic map that Ondaatje’s book is becoming: not only has the witnessing of his family history become a tangible experience, reinforced by the house metaphor, but the journey through its different rooms will not follow conventional pathways, such as chronology. While not dissimilar from the hapticized histories of Billy the Kid and Buddy Bolden, the emphasis on contiguity in Running in the Family reinforces the sense of Ondaatje’s proximity to Sri Lanka and his family during the construction of his testimonial account. The latter does not capture an objective picture of the situation in pre-Independence Ceylon and post-Independence Sri Lanka; neither does it lament the author’s estrangement from his family. Instead, Ondaatje’s witness writing becomes a “fabulation,” which, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, does not aim for fidelity to an external reality or for crude political indoctrination of the reader.66 Linking artistic creativity with the “invocation” of “a people,” Deleuze and Guattari outline the imbrications of art and ideology. On the one hand, the creation of “a people” is inevitably linked to the operation of agents of the essential “imaginary community.” On the other hand, it is through incessant creative becoming that a people can be sustained; while it is not the “job” of the artist to “bring into existence” a real people, revolutionary movements that ossify into the

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system they have tried to topple can be even more damaging.67 Ondaatje’s witnessing, in this sense, is not a quest for the retrieval of or reintegration into a lost family or nation, nor is it a plea for radical upheavals in the status quo. Instead, by displacing the center of coherence, origin, and uniformity, Running in the Family gestures at its fabulated (rather than authentic) testimony, simultaneously with that contesting transparent representation and mainstream historiography, national and familial originary wholeness. The hegemonic episteme is foregrounded early in the narrative: the epigraphs by the Franciscan friar Oderic and by Douglas Amarasekera reiterate Orientalist representations of the island. Situated next to a map of Ceylon — executed in compliance with Eurocentric cartographic conventions — both statements provide the verbal complement to the visual image. The truth claims of these representations — based on the scientific impartiality of cartography, the transparent language of a factual statement (Amaasekera’s), and the evidentiary power of testimonial accounts (Oderic’s) — are destabilized by the narrator’s oneiric immersion in Sri Lanka even before his arrival there, as well as by the spillage of “Asia” beyond the limits of cartographic, national, and subjective boundaries: Asia. The name was a gasp from a dying mouth. An ancient word that had to be whispered, would never be used as a battle cry. The word sprawled. It had none of the clipped sound of Europe, America, Canada. The vowels took over, slept on the map with the S.68

Ondaatje’s audio-typographical translation of the continent of Asia transgresses the linguistic domain and spills into the corporeal, becoming a gasp and a whisper. Even though the place is voided of materiality by the “dying mouth,” “battle cry,” and “clipped sound” of Eurocentric denotations, which transform it into an abstract name and an optical map, Ondaatje aims to restore a cartography that is not confined to the two dimensional page, that spills into sound, touch, and smell. Planning his journey back in time and back to his birthplace, he insists on tactile exploration, on touching his family “into words,” on constructing the type of rhizomatic map that Deleuze and Guattari talk about.69 Similarly to the letters that “Asia” is composed of, Ondaatje’s gaze splashes out of the margins of maps, onto the floor and into the wine glass of his farewell party, to turn inside into his operatic memories and thaw them with a caressing pen. The pendulum has swayed from the optical distance of the times of his parents’ generation and the place of “Burgher surreality”70 to the nightmares that flood his Canadian winter. What Ondaatje discovers, before even the narrative proper starts, is that he is already running, that he is already there.

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The intensive sense of tactile exploration, however, does not become another piece of tropical gossip; rather, by hapticizing normative historical and familial narratives, Ondaatje carries an intimate act of witnessing for the direct witnesses he himself could not be. Running his fingers over engraved stone slabs and silverfish-ridden pages, he discerns in these tangible historical records the scars of exclusion of the intimate. Language, exemplified in the Sinhala alphabet, becomes everyday objects; letters merge with the surfaces on which they are written, so that alphabet and reality are contiguous rather than contingent: I still believe the most beautiful alphabet was created by the Sinhalese. The insect of ink curves into a shape that is almost a sickle, spoon, eyelid. The letters are washed blunt glass which betray no jaggedness. Sanskrit was governed by verticals, but its sharp grid features were not possible in Ceylon. Here the Ola leaves which people wrote on were too brittle. [. . .] When I was five — the only time in my life when my handwriting was meticulous — I sat in the tropical classrooms and learned the letters , and , repeating them page after page. How to write. The self-portrait of language. . Lid on a cooking utensil that takes the shape of fire.71

Sinhala letters become ideograms of the reality they are depicting not only by diminishing the gap between signs and referents, but also by being defined by the surface on which they are written (the fragility of Ola leaves being complemented by the curling, “blunt glass” quality of Sinhala). Ondaatje’s inclusion of several Sinhala letters, together with the English translation of two sentences in Sinhala72 and the translation of the letters’ shapes into everyday objects (“sickle,” “spoon,” “lid,” “cooking utensil”), enacts the writer’s haptic urge “to talk to all the lost history like [a] deserving lover.”73 The self-portrait of a language is not premised on referentiality only, but also on the indexical connection between alphabet, external reality, and writing surface. Whereas Michael discovers in “the shapes and forms of [his] first alphabet”74 his everyday reality and his body, he abstains from fully translating the Sinhala alphabet in phonetic, syllabic, or any other linguistic terms, preserving some of its opacity for the reader to explore. Beyond the phenomenological appreciation of writing aesthetics, Ondaatje also highlights the significance of intimacy for political purposes. Including in his testimony Lakdasa Wikkramasinha’s “Don’t talk to me about Matisse . . . ”75 Ondaatje marks both his distance from the political poem — using italicized typography — and his acknowledgement of the poet’s different experience of Sri Lanka. He nonetheless insists on the recognition of the intimate, to which his own poem, “The Cinnamon Peeler” testifies.76

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Recounting an intimate scene between a cinnamon peeler and his wife, the poem is replete with the sensuality of touch and smell, imbued with a particularity that Wikkramasinha’s political poem lacks. Although potentially read as invoking a frozen image of Sri Lanka, the poem’s emphasis on “the missing perfume”77 refers not only to the main commodity exported from colonial Ceylon, cinnamon, but also to the violent plundering of the island. The yearning for olfactory and tactile mapping between the central couple in the poem gestures at the reciprocity of their love, but the reference to wounds and scars also implies the way in which History is inscribed onto their bodies. It is through the affectionate proximity to such historical traces, Ondaatje’s poem suggests, that an engaged form of witnessing can take place. This poem traces the potential of multisensory engagement as an alternative form of non-appropriative interaction. Similarly to “Women Like You,”78 which maps in a series of close-ups the bodies of women carved on a rock near Sigiriya, “The Cinnamon Peeler” transforms material reality and the surface of historical inscription into intimate caressing experiences. Not only does Running in the Family map olfactory experience onto concrete realities, but it also highlights its cooptation by colonial discourse: They [the Europeans] came originally and overpowered the land obsessive for something as delicate as the smell of cinnamon. Becoming wealthy with spices. When ships were still approaching, ten miles out at sea, captains would spill cinnamon onto the deck and invite passengers on board to smell Ceylon before the island even came into view. [. . .] A perfumed sea.79

If the olfactory can subvert the scopic regime of the colonial gaze and potentially reveal an embodied way of encountering difference, smells can also be parceled into commodities and shipments as colonial practices of exploitation reveal. Similarly to photographs, indices of the presence of the photographed reality, smell evokes the physicality of its source and triggers off a tactile engagement between its source and the perceiver. At the same time, however, the transience of scent is inevitably linked to the transience of olfactory experience, making the perceiver indirectly complicit in a disappearance. Ondaatje’s use of smell in his sensual description of the colonization of Ceylon gestures at the materiality of the island and its resistance to symbolical translation. Simultaneously with that, however, the dispersive and ephemeral nature of smell parallels both the scattering of the pernicious karapothas over the island, and the obliteration of its population’s difference in the Eurocentric exotic representations. Just as the complicity in smell’s disappearance may be disavowed by the olfactory perceiver — smell will exist and disappear even without the perceiver’s presence80 — the indirect

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(most likely distant) profiteering from the colonial exploitation of the island’s riches may remain hidden and unacknowledged. The sense of taste performs a similar double function insofar as both tactile contact and physical destruction (incorporation and discharge) are involved. While sensual descriptions of “local” food and drink can be regarded as staple for exoticist and émigré literature, Ondaatje’s thalagoya tongue ritual can hardly be assessed as palatable. Basing his account on both “local superstitions” and the authority of Robert Knox’s An Historical Relation of Ceylon,81 Ondaatje draws attention to the affective aspects of language by reinforcing the indexical link between the organ of speech (the tongue) and linguistic competence (language).82 Instead of focusing on the flavors of the specialty, he elaborates on the creativity and eloquence inspired by the indigestible thalagoya. Resonating with Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of the tongue as a site of the mutual imbrications of taste, touch, and meaning, “[c]easing to be the organ of one of the senses, [tongue] becomes an instrument of Sense,”83 language in Running in the Family contains both abstract and tactile elements, symbolical and indexical qualities. Likewise, taste is not merely a base bodily sensation resisting if not obstructing verbosity; on the contrary, Ondaatje’s attention to flavors — if not always palatable — draws the reader’s attention to the physical experience and opacity of language. Enacted by examples of untranslated and untranscribed Sinhala words and letters in the text, the materiality of language bears the imprint of, but is not exclusive to, cultural difference84 as well as encounters of different (inassimilable) realities. Unable to understand the father and the past, Ondaatje looks into the mirror of the book he is writing. But this mirror is not a narcissistic celebration of self, family, or nation; it is a quest for intimacy. It is through his family that the narrator joins the pyramid of the Burgher community of the ’20s and ’30s, of the disturbing years of war, Independence, and divorce in the ’40s, of the political upheavals in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. Undoubtedly, the distance in the last three decades before Ondaatje’s return home makes his text sparse in informative substance and overt political discussion, but by haptically reconstructing the “human pyramid,” he succeeds in touching different histories without appropriating them into a reductive account. Running in the Family encapsulates not only the wanderings of a belated witness and the anxiety of coming too late, but also the ethics of negotiating History through gossip, of modulating language with an embrace, of reviving photographs in embodied memories. I would love to photograph this. The thin muscle on the upper arms, the bones and veins at the wrist that almost become part of the discreet bangle, all disappearing into the river of bright sari or faded cotton print.85

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Ondaatje seems to have found in the imaginary photograph of his aunt’s arm the adequate way of conveying the complexity of his witnessing. It is through a loving close-up of small details, such as bones and bangles, that the brightness of the sari and the fading of the cotton can be conveyed, albeit only as a blur. It is through an affectionate invitation to the reader for intimate exploration of the text that the regimented practices of normative writing can be challenged. Meanwhile, the partiality and tangibility of the haptic embody the author’s recognition of the incompleteness and fabulation of his project, as well as its implication in normative representations.

Witnessing the Body/The Body Witnessing in Anil’s Ghost After a 15-year absence from Sri Lanka, Anil Tissera returns as the forensic pathologist of an international mission to investigate allegations of human rights violations. She is paired off with a local archaeologist, Sarath Diyasena, to carry out her inquiry on several skeletons discovered in an ancient burial site in a government-controlled area. However, Anil detects that one of the skeletons, whom they provisionally name Sailor (the other three being Tinker, Tailor, and Soldier), appears to be the victim of a more recent violent death, which will implicate the authorities. The story, therefore, follows Anil’s urge not only to uncover Sailor’s identity, but also to incriminate the Sri Lankan government. However, her idealism is shattered when she has to confront the disenchanted “locals” — the archaeologist Sarath, the doctor Gamini, the epigraphist Palipana — whose disappointment with mainstream political movements has turned them into bitter cynics. While politics and its rhetoric provide no solution to the crisis but instead further instigate animosity and violence, artistic recreation offers a site where those disempowered by political structures can voice their position. Having hired a local artificer, Ananda, to reconstruct Sailor’s face for identificatory purposes, Anil and Sarath eventually realize that the face Ananda has recreated, while bearing a general resemblance to the actual victim, also incorporates the features of Ananda’s missing wife Sirissa, the traits of the artificer’s grief for her, the pain of other tortured civilians, and the grief of their relatives. One never gets to know what happens to Anil and her investigation: after the authorities confiscate her notes and Sailor, Sarath (at his own peril, which ultimately leads to his death) manages to retrieve the skeleton and advises Anil to leave the country. However, whether she manages to do so and what she does with her recreated report remains unknown. Instead, the book averts its gaze from the Western, action-driven character and focuses on two vignettes: one of Ananda reconstructing a broken statue of the Buddha and another of Ananda

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painting the eyes of a newly constructed statue of the Buddha — two powerful creative acts carried out against a demoralizing background of violence. The corporeal assumes a central presence in Anil’s Ghost: bodies are injured, mutilated, and murdered; caressed, cured, and recreated; abducted, disinterred, and investigated. A series of disturbing images that recalls Ondaatje’s suggestive representation of the 1971 JVP Insurgency in Running in the Family — “the Kelani and Mahaveli rivers moved to the sea, heavy with [the] bodies”86 of insurgent students — the close-ups on the bodily experience in the later novel draw attention to the appropriation of the body by political and scientific discourses. For in the context of war, as Elaine Scarry concludes, the urge to presence the corporeal by inflicting pain informs strategies of absencing and destruction: not only is the body’s owner made extremely aware of their own physicality and mortality, but the corporeal is also constructed as the conduit to the betrayal of one’s self. Anil’s declared objective, as a representative of an international human rights organization, is to reverse this dehumanizing process, uncover the truth that “shall set [one] free,”87 and right the wrongs done to them. Adamant in her faith in universal justice and in her abilities to act as a just witness to the atrocities in Sri Lanka, she embarks on an inquest whereby rights and wrongs will be ascertained by the abstract standards of scientific impartiality and universal justice. Approaching the traces of human life she comes across as evidence and emptying the retrieved bodies of the specificity of their “character and nuance and mood,” Anil uses them for purely representative purposes as instances of race, age, occupation, location. Echoing her university professor Clyde Snow, she assumes that “[o]ne village can speak for many villages. One victim can speak for many victims.”88 Without actively causing suffering, Anil nonetheless participates in the objectification of the corporeal by assuming that the scientific tools at her disposal enable her to access and explain the painful experiences of many others. Such objectification initiates a quasi-healing process, which is, according to Scarry, “a necessary prelude to the collective task of diminishing pain.”89 Anil’s empirical translation of suffering and pain into medical lists of detached observations produces impersonal, ahistorical, “permanent truths, same for Colombo as for Troy”: She began to examine the skeleton again under sulphur light, summarizing the facts of his death so far, the permanent truths, same for Colombo as for Troy. One forearm broken. Partial burning. Vertebrae damage in the neck. The possibility of a small bullet wound in the skull. Entrance and exit. She could read Sailor’s last actions by knowing the wounds on bone.90

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The dismemberment of Sailor’s body into wounds and bones, medical phrases and an incriminating report, enables the construction of the illusion of transparency and universality: an otherwise inscrutable body is laid bare for the observation of the pathologist, or for the consumption of the reader. Reduced to a sum of “organs without a body,” Sailor (later identified as the plumbago miner Ruwan Kumara) has become a text for Anil to read, edit, and interpret; as Rosi Braidotti concludes: “The bodily surface, and the complex montage of organs that composes it, is thus reduced to pure surface, exteriority without depth, a movable theatre of the self.”91 The interchangeability of the dismembered body parts mirrors the myths of equivalence that the capitalist economy of exchange disseminates and the myths of identity that the colonial rhetoric of exclusion upholds; thus, the popular “Jaipur Limb” is simply defined by its price tag of thirty pounds, “cheaper because Asian victims could walk without a shoe.”92 The loss of integrity of the human body — with body parts removed, stitched, replaced, valued in monetary terms, purchased, and discarded — is mirrored in the impossibility of a coherent self. This is why Anil’s insistence on preserving her position as an impartial external witness ascertaining the truth of Sri Lanka is untenable; nor can her brand of justice offer a solution to the situation. In contrast, Gamini, Sarath’s brother and doctor by profession, will not only denounce any humanist givens — similarly to Palipana’s orphaned niece Lakma, who “was scared of the evidence of anything human”93 — but also immerse himself in the comfort of the smell of soap and the tender touch of a hand: This was when [Gamini] stopped believing in man’s rule on earth. He turned away from every person who stood up for a war. Or the principle of one’s land, or pride of ownership, or even personal rights. All of those motives ended up somehow in the arms of careless power. One was no worse and no better than the enemy. He believed only in the mothers sleeping against their children, the great sexuality of spirit in them, the sexuality of care, so the children would be confident and safe during the night.94

Resenting adherence to identitarianism, ownership, and individualism, Gamini finds comfort in “the sexuality of care,” reminiscent of Kip’s longing in The English Patient for the caring love of his ayah.95 Like his dying patients, Gamini longs for a motherly arm across his ribs, just as Anil remembers the language of tactility between her and her ayah Lalitha.96 The disenchanted doctor’s investment in the tactile and olfactory seems to be “the only reasonable constant”97 as bodies will never stop turning up. Whereas their huge numbers testify to the instrumentalization of the corporeal into

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a tool of political warfare, Gamini’s yearning for the embrace of tactility indicates the potential of corporeality to resist identitarian inscriptions. In a situation where “[o]ne was no worse and no better than the enemy,” where there is no “information of who the enemy was,”98 Anil’s trust in scientific empiricism and objectivity is challenged by a truth, which, in Palipana’s words, “is just opinion.”99 Once a renowned and meticulous scientist himself, Palipana has lost his reputation and had his name removed from the Sinhala encyclopedia for allegedly forging the evidence for his translations of the interlinear texts of the Sigiri rock graffiti. These accusations, however, have been based on the absence of Palipana’s sources from the legitimate national chronicle, the Cūlavamsa,100 rather than on proof of intentional forgery. The epigraphist’s crime — his non-alignment with the official truth and his breach of scientific methodology — is interpreted as a gesture of betrayal. For the denounced scholar, on the other hand, such a gesture is liberating, “the last stage of a long, truthful dance”;101 the truth that he is after is the one “that could only be guessed at,”102 not the one found in history books or “graven images.”103 A clash, thus, emerges between Anil’s belief in logic, distance, objectivity and the embodied forms of history that Palipana advocates: For him, now, all history was filled with sunlight, every hollow was filled with rain. Though as he worked he was conscious that the paper itself that held these histories was aging fast. It was insect-bitten, sun-faded, wind-scattered. And there was his old, thin body. Palipana too was now governed only by the elements.104

Reminiscent of the tangible memories and decomposing documents described in Running in the Family, the history Palipana approaches is elemental and immanent, rather than monumental or teleological; and his body is implicated in his scientific practice. Exploring “every problem with many hands,”105 the epigraphist relies on the skills of local artificers and the stories of dhobi women in order to approach the banned “interlinear stuff”106 and the excluded “unprovable truth,”107 resurrecting as much as recreating times and eras long gone by. Studying “history as if it were a body,”108 Palipana sees corporeality as indelible from the historical corpus — a corpus imbued with the specificity of real lives rather than the abstractedness of grand ideas, a corpus defined by its opacity and resistant to the scopic consumption of optical representation, a corpus threatened by silverfish and moths just as the human body is susceptible to disease and physical destruction. Similarly to Palipana, his former student Sarath acts as a link between the “mortality of flesh and bone and the immortality of image on rock”;109 having renounced the social world, the archaeologist rejoices in his “dark trade with

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the earth.”110 At the same time, while Palipana is looking for the banned and the untold by exploring the destroyed and absenced traces of the interlinear, Sarath is always considerate of intimate histories that have happened in the cracks of a culture of musealization and national heritage: He would hold statues two thousand years old in his arms. Or place his hand against old, warm rock that had been cut against it. This was his pleasure. Not conversation or the education of others or power, but simply to place his hand against a gal vihara, a living stone . . .111

Even though Anil is prepared to dismiss Sarath’s microscopic approach to the surroundings of a fact as an aesthetic distraction, for him this reflects a more ethical engagement with the plight of those that have to suffer the consequences of the fleeting administration of justice by (Western) visitors. Not only are universal justice and absolute truth chimeras conveniently employed by macropolitical structures and discourses, but they are extremely dangerous insofar as they ignore the pledged human lives: Sarath knew that for her the journey was in getting to the truth. But what would the truth bring them into? It was a flame against a sleeping lake of petrol. Sarath had seen truth broken into suitable pieces and used by the foreign press alongside irrelevant photographs. A flippant gesture towards Asia that might lead, as a result of this information, to new vengeance and slaughter.112

Just as the human body can be parceled into usable parts by all the parties in the violent conflict, as well as by the empiricism of historical and medical discourse, so too truth can be packaged into profitable pieces of information that can not only sell papers but also take lives. At the same time, however, Sarath’s reliance on partial truths, his attendance to fractures and sutures, differs from the economy of exchangeability that human lives and body parts have been subjected to. In contrast to the truths packaged by external observers, Sarath’s insistence on the fragment gestures at the impossibility of seamless justice and at the ignored reality of human lives unwittingly trapped in the conflict. If Palipana’s old belief was that “the ascendancy of the idea”113 is the only survivor in a world where art and history also partake of a mutable and perishable physicality, the ease with which the idea summons lives and mutilates bodies is critiqued via the reference to the criminal dismemberment and economic exploitation of cultural artifacts by museums in the West.114 Anil, therefore, will realize that there has been a singular life, a life ruthlessly taken at that, behind Sailor’s skeleton and identity. This life did not

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amount merely to the occupations of a plumbago miner and a toddy tapper — tangential clues to a life that distortions on the bone have helped her detect. This was a life whose singularity has been evacuated with the elimination of the body’s opacity — a life reduced to material for manipulation, torture, and representational statistics by the macropolitical machinery. This life also involved the intimate surroundings of a family and fellow villagers, all in the plight of ultimate warfare, governed by fear and manipulated through pain. Anil’s urge for justice cannot account for such intimate experiences; instead, she will need to approximate all the historians, venerators, and ministers of the body: Palipana, studying the body of scriptures; Sarath, exploring the body of archaeological environs; Gamini, ministering to the bodies of the all too live or all too dead human beings in his wards; and Ananda, molding into life the stone bodies of the Buddha. For all her trust in scientific objectivity, Anil eventually becomes aware that she will have to intersperse the time of her samples with personal time, to engage with the “archaeological surround of a fact,”115 rather than observe with “the mercy of distance,”116 and the “false empathy and blame”117 of political writing: She used to believe that meaning allowed a person a door to escape grief and fear. But she saw that those who were slammed and stained by violence lost the power of language and logic. It was the way to abandon emotion, a last protection of the self. They held on to just the coloured and patterned sarong a missing relative last slept in, which in normal times would have become a household rag but now was sacred.118

Her “reading” of Sailor’s wounds cannot act as a healing process for those trapped by the unidentifiable enemies in a situation where “[d]eath, loss, was ‘unfinished,’ so you could not walk through it.”119 Unable to carry out the “working/walking through” death, torture or pain via narrative integration and rationalization, people “slammed and stained by violence” hold on to the tangible traces of those that have been forcefully absenced. Whereas the discourse of violence that Scarry conceptualizes frames the body as a site of betrayal and abjection threatening to destroy the self,120 the grieving, and disempowered civilians that Anil encounters relish their intimacy to items belonging to their loved ones. Investing their intensive affections in physical objects, these belated mourners resuscitate the bodies of the abducted and the murdered, bodies whose materiality is uncertain. Acting as constant reminders, these traces preserve their inscrutability to intrusive gazes such as those of scientific forensics and sensational journalism. The pornographic optical gazes over the zone of conflict are conveyed through Ondaatje’s verbal translation of the maps of Sri Lanka:

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These optical renditions of the island make visible different aspects of its environment: ore and minerals, bird life, and climate zones. An instance of the omniscient claims of optical representations, these maps not only replicate the objectification of Sailor’s body that Anil’s medical report enacts, but also reiterate the colonial reduction of the island to its natural riches and trade potential. Rather than being explored as a place inhabited by varied peoples and their cultures, Sri Lanka is translated into a sample of abstract knowledge, as uniform and homogeneous as the maps with which the island is represented. The sense of abstraction is reinforced by Ondaatje’s choice not to include a visual rendition of the island, unlike the map in Running in the Family. In this way, not only are Sri Lanka and its inhabitants even further detached from the reader of such optical representations, but the conflict, its violence, and victims are also transformed into media events and mere rhetoric. Anil’s Ghost foregrounds the tectonic slippages of evidential truth and brutal history by focusing on the abuse of the corporeal by identitarian mechanisms.122 By exploring intimately the urgent necessity to take sides in a civil war situation, the novel questions not only the impartiality of the Western distant gaze but also the subversive potential of Sri Lankan identity politics. At the core of this critique is the vacuity of historical and political teleology in a situation permeated by the sense of entrapment. Although the conflict in Sri Lanka has been defined as driven by identitarian allegiances — Sinhalese vs. Tamil, government vs. anti-government socialist insurgents — what the novel critiques is each side’s usurpation of the intimate “house [of] fearful memories”123 in the brain, the amygdala. Thus, Sarath and Gamini help Anil incriminate the government, while acknowledging the violence of both separatist guerrillas in the North and anti-government insurgents in the South. Likewise, the doctors Gamini and Linus Corea, when abducted, treat both civilians and guerrillas, being more concerned with the mutilated bodies in front of them than with their ethnic belonging or ideological conviction. The questioning of identitarian discourses is reflected in the treatment of religious iconography in the novel: the meaning of crucifixion has been stripped of its redemptive Christian aspect to remain simply a punitive procedure for truck drivers; Buddhist poya celebrations have become a good opportunity

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for mass killings; monks like Palipana’s brother Nārada are the targets of political murders; statues of the Buddha and the Bodhisattvas are not merely devotional objects but also embodiments of communal violence.124 Even though Western political, religious, and discursive practices are implied to be inadequate and damaging — neither can crucifixion offer redemption, nor can the foreign rule of Westminster offer a solution125 — the local, nationalist approach is presented as equally destructive. The usurpation of the affective powers of the corporeal by identitarian practices is nowhere made clearer than in Ondaatje’s rendition of the Nētra Mangala ceremony. A ritual of consecration, Nētra Mangala is characterized by ambivalence: praising sight as the site of life and truth, it also questions divine omnipotence insofar as it is a mortal artificer that paints in the divine “eye.”126 At the same time, the artificer cannot meet the Buddha’s gaze directly save for the intermediary of a mirror. The intermediary object, the mirror, similarly to the artificer’s paintbrush, plays a vital role in the creative process of divine empowerment: being the surface where divine and mortal looks meet, it acts as a link between the Buddha and the artificer.127 It acts, according to Ananda Coomaraswamy, as the “lightning conductor” of the “evil eye” of the Buddha image.128 The artisan’s mirror does not simply bolster the devotee’s sentient experience, but also assumes the status of a religious relic. Its sacralization and empowerment through the painting ceremony act as “a cultural strategy for bridging temporal and spatial separations through a complex interaction of material objects, abstract notions, emotional orientations, and ritualized behaviors”;129 indexicality and proximity in this context are therefore mobilized in order to increase the affective investment in, and thus validation of, existing power dynamics. Nancy Wood has likewise commented on the reassessment of affects in nationalist thought, which in its turn has assumed “their magnetic, contagious and volatile character in the life of modern nation-states (and aspiring nation-states).”130 The spectacularization of collective memory through commemorative institutions has become more and more objectless, less politically and historically specific, thus reinvigorating a “pacified, national sentiment, [which] no longer functions as the agent of un nationalisme agressif, but instead fosters un nationalisme amoureux.”131 In this sense, the image of Buddhism that resurfaces in Anil’s Ghost is simultaneously syncretic and identitarian, affective and destructive. The reconstructed Buddha statue, at the end of the novel, does not present a hopeful image of harmonious existence; it will remain with its “quilted”132 face and in sutures. Forensic investigations, medical interventions, political rhetoric, and religious discourse in Anil’s Ghost subject the human body to an economics of exchange, whereby it loses its vitality, singularity, and integrity. On the one

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hand, such discursive practices can be seen as bolstering disciplinarian mechanisms for the production of what Michel Foucault has called “docile bodies”: “[bodies] that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved.”133 On the other hand, the numerous instances of display of tortured bodies in the novel suggest that the public humiliation of the corporeal by the dominant political discourse serves not only to instill terror but also to affirm control in a moment of major epistemological slippage: At particular moments when there is within a society a crisis of belief — that is, when some central idea or ideology or cultural construct has ceased to elicit a population’s belief either because it is manifestly fictitious or because it has for some reason been divested of ordinary forms of substantiation — the sheer material factualness of the human body will be borrowed to lend that cultural construct the aura of “realness” and “certainty.”134

Violent corporeal inscriptions, then, serve to stabilize the control of power and ideology via embodiment. Moreover, the display of the hegemonic power’s control over the human body demands a reciprocal validation from the intended audiences: whereas the body tortured, punished, or mobilized (to war) is an index to the superiority of a certain power mechanism,135 the intended audience becomes a witness taking part in and affirming existing power relations. Speaking of public humiliations of the corporeal and their spectators, Foucault concludes: Not only must people know, they must see with their own eyes. Because they must be made to be afraid; but also because they must be the witnesses, the guarantors, of the punishment, and because they must to a certain extent take part in it.136

Such participation guarantees the witnesses’ subscription to and reaffirmation of the discursive practice being applied; it is through their optical act of witnessing, a witnessing of complicity — being purely visual and unilateral — that the dominant power structure can continue exerting control. Thus, the mind/body dualism is perpetuated: appealing to the “spiritual self,” mechanisms of control not only construct the corporeal as inferior and effectively absence it, but they also lead to a disembodied form of witnessing wherein the body is the surface for the inscription of a punishment. If in the classical period (in Foucault’s terminology) flesh was publicly humiliated as a spectacle of weakness, in modernity the less spectacular disciplinary method demands that the selves carry out the humiliation of their own flesh. In either case, corporeality becomes a surface to be inscribed, a disempowered and paradoxically invisible material presence.

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In Anil’s Ghost, identitarian discourse, media representations, and Western intervention become such complicit witnesses of the body; premised on a scopic economy of detached observation and optical distancing between subject and object, these complicit witnesses adjudicate and blame within the framework of their respective moral or legal systems. At the same time, however, the novel gestures at another site for witnessing, coming from within the corporeal itself. By renouncing the power of vision and visibility — for instance, two of the main characters, Palipana and Ananda, are blind or with failing eyesight — and reinserting the importance of tactile experience into a hitherto optically informed discourse of witnessing, the body in the act of witnessing, the witnessing body, attains the potential to disrupt the hegemonic optical regime. The reduction of distance, which is a decisive factor for optical perspective, clear definition, and narrative logic, resuscitates the potency of intimacy for conveying the irreducible opacity of being. However, as Laura Marks observes, the boundary transgression and the subversion of the subject’s supremacy enacted by tactile epistemology also expose one to the unknown and the unknowable. Instead of provoking anxiety — as epistemological uncertainty would do for the unitary self — Ondaatje’s text presents a close-up of witnessing that not only testifies to abducted memories and unacknowledged experiences, but also empowers the human body to act as an ethical and affectionate witness to the inscrutability of pain, the inexpressibility of grief, the silence of the witnesses to pain. In this sense, Anil’s Ghost enacts a form of agentive witnessing, which renounces optical distance for haptic proximity, which conveys the micropolitical potential of shared vulnerability, which restores but does not resolve the untranslatable opacity of beings. Thus, the reinvention of Sailor’s face by the artificer Ananda empowers the corporeal by ignoring the requirement for semblance to the actual murder victim, who remains unidentified till almost the end of the novel. The artificer kneads into the face the quest for tranquility of any unwilling participant in the conflict as well as the anxieties of those witnessing. The artistic act itself is performed as an illicit love affair, which contrasts with the schematic scientific research process: each night Ananda will embrace and caress Sailor’s skeleton after he has worked on the skull all day and destroyed it in the evening. The artificer appears to re-enact over and over again the destruction of the civil war and the awareness that any material traces of one’s life or death have gone missing. For he has missed the encounter with physical pain: his wife, Sirissa, has been abducted and supposedly murdered. There are only conjectures, but there are neither remains, nor witnesses. In Sailor’s case, the bodily witnesses to his pain — his broken bones and half-burned body — are present and available, but they themselves have had

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no witness to their witnessing of pain. If Ananda had reconstructed Sailor’s skull for purely identificatory purposes, this would not have offered solace for his pain and the suffering of other villagers. Neither would have diatribes or accusations. Ananda’s creative approach of molding depersonalized pain into a fossil is deprived of the vociferous tumult of revolutionary discourses; it transcends the binary model of majority vs. minority and enacts instead the micropolitical position of intimate and affectionate relationality. Thus, Sailor’s beheaded body and body-less head will not resemble the punitive “heads-on-stakes” expeditions of paramilitary forces; they will embody “the peacefulness [Ananda] wanted for any victim.”137 Sailor’s reinvented face does more than simply help identify the victim of a murder and thus provide evidence to incriminate the government; its kneaded-in calm and placidity become a material witness to unacknowledged torture and a personal witness to the grief of the mourners-never-to-be. It also enables Ananda, the one unable to witness the pain of torture and mourn in time, to become a belated witness to the relief his wife must have wanted in her last hours. Anil responds to this act of reciprocal witnessing with an acknowledgement of her own helplessness and vulnerability. Aware that Ananda’s reconstruction does not resemble the actual victim, but is rather an intimate portrait of personal and communal grief, she breaks down into tears not only because of her failure to right wrongs and tame the amygdala of Sri Lanka’s horrors, but also as a sign of her readiness to “embrace”138 the shame of having tried to objectify an unshareable experience. Ananda’s tenderness towards her constitutes his comforting testimony to Anil’s shame, an act that translates onto her face the composure he has kneaded into Sailor: Ananda’s hand on her shoulder to quiet her while the other hand came up to her face, kneaded the skin of that imploded tension of weeping as if hers too was a face being sculpted, though she could tell that wasn’t in his thoughts. This was a tenderness she was receiving. Then his other hand on her other shoulder, the other thumb under her right eye. Her sobbing had stopped.139

Ananda’s gesture embodies the quest for comfort and calm of those “touched” by the conflict, and by placing his thumb onto Anil’s face, not only does he bear witness to her despair, in the same way that her shame is her belated testimony to Ananda’s suffering, but his body also becomes the surface where Sailor’s and Sirissa’s unwitnessed pain encounters Anil’s renewed tenderness for Lalitha. This act of witnessing, then, creates a site for affect exchange, approximating the eroticism of hapticity that Laura Marks describes:

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What is erotic is being able to become an object with and for the world, and to return to being a subject in the world; to be able to trust someone or something to take you through this process; and to be trusted to do the same for others.140

Rather than a disempowered and manipulable evidence of the hegemony of a sovereign, the corporeal assumes the role of an agentive witness. It thus helps redefine the act of witnessing as an embodied process of reciprocal exchange of affect, a process that relinquishes optical control and uniform subjectivity. Such acts of witnessing not only revise negative conceptualizations of the body as a treacherous vulnerability, but also enable a form of relationality with pain that will not “work through” suffering into a transparent narrative of sublimated emotion. The last vignette of Anil’s Ghost captures a creative act which is neither cathartic nor devotionary, and which replays the dialogue between distance and proximity, although this time with divine allusions. In addition to the Buddha statue that has been defiled by thieves and needs to be reconstructed, Ananda is involved in the consecration ceremony of a new statue of the Buddha, not far away from the broken one. In the eye-painting ritual he performs a multiplicity of gazes will be swapped between the new Buddha and Ananda. Concentrating on the artificer’s creative powers through his intimate experience of the divinity, the episode highlights the permeability of artificer and statue through the haptic medley of the visual and the tactile: Soon, though, there would be the evolving moment when the eyes, reflected in the mirror, would see him, fall into him. The first and last look given to someone so close. After this hour the statue would be able to witness figures from a great distance [. . .]. It was the figure of the world the statue would see forever, in rainlight and sunlight, a combustible world of weather even without the human element [. . .]. And now with human sight he was seeing all the fibres of natural history around him. He could witness the smallest approach of a bird, every flick of its wing, or a hundred-mile storm coming down off the mountains near Gonagola and skirting to the plains [. . .]. Ananda briefly saw this angle of the world. There was a seduction for him there. The eyes he had cut and focussed with his father’s chisel showed him this.141

Ananda’s effort filters into the inanimate statue, thus lending it not only sight but also life. However, before erecting the boundary between divinity and humanity, the new god will caress the artificer, their looks will mingle. What follows is a kind of textu(r)al osmosis between the divine and the human: whether the “human sight” which captures every feel and flicker of the world is Ananda’s or the Buddha’s, the Buddha’s gaze reflected in the mirror as seen

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by Ananda or Ananda’s gaze reflected in the mirror as seen by the Buddha, is hard to determine. Although in this brief moment the artificer gives in to the seduction of optical supremacy, this is a supremacy that his chisel and mirror have generated, the closeness being even greater when the deity will bear witness with the faultiness of “human sight” even without “the human element.” Ananda, thus, manages to mould the act of witnessing into an entity as impersonal as a deity, and yet “so close” as his own creation. By bringing together the cracks of the broken image and the overall image of the new statue Ananda practices a type of art that will bear witness to the world and awake the Buddha to the sweetness of the surroundings. Unlike the Western guests who depart from the bloodshed (read Anil and all the visiting journalists and academics), the look that Ananda revitalizes is that of the insider, whose home is in flames and whose body devoured by the encroachments of identitarianism and spectacle-thirsty culture industries. Such an embodied response to History is witnessing to and “taking sides” with the absenced and the muted, the entrapped and the immobilized, providing them with the agency to bear witness to an impossible reality on their own opaque terms.

Chapter 3

Haptic Writing and Micropolitical Betrayals The place of imperial sovereignty [. . .] is smooth. It might appear to be free of the binary divisions or striation of modern boundaries, but really it is crisscrossed by so many fault lines that it only appears as a continuous, uniform space. MICHAEL HARDT AND ANTONIO NEGRI1

Recent debates exploring the intersections of the political and the aesthetic have focused on the rift between the “textualist” turn of the 1980s and 1990s, and the call for more direct engagement with material, historical realities.2 The latter critical cohort insist on the unequivocal distinction between matters of political urgency and cultural practices, on the radical disentanglement of political engagement with social realities from the refined analysis of textual ambivalence. Peter Hallward, for instance, has contested aesthetico-political thought in general — and Deleuzian as well as mainstream postcolonial critique in particular — as self-generative and solipsistic, divorced from “specific” historical contexts or external frames of reference. Careful to establish the failings of Marxist literary analyses, Hallward highlights their problematic conflation of literature with politics and historical context: [W]hat happens or is created in literature must be considered as a creative process in its own right, without immediate, specifying reference to the context of its production, or political affiliation. However complimentary their effects may be in certain situations, as a matter of principle political commitment and literary production should be treated as thoroughly distinct processes.3

Hallward’s insistence on the separation of the literary from the political resonates with critical laments about the marginalization of confrontational voices4 and the “death of politics”5 in discourses that have been defined as deeply political, such as postcolonial theory and literature. These accounts foreground the need for the strategic reinscription of identitarian thought and political doxa in order to ensure the viability of any political action in the future. And this sought after politics is clearly designated as oppositional; thus, Chris Bongie concurs by calling for the “‘repoliticizing’ of postcolonial studies, the (re)creation of a space for anti-colonial discourses within the

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field.”6 Postcolonial literature, at the same time, appears to have retained its politically suspect position as an activity that is not only complicit in the relentless onslaught of global market forces, but also overrated in its relevance to the articulation of and engagement with postcolonial matters proper.7 Relegating literature to a domain seen not only as divorced from “real-life situations” but also as confined to the abstract ambivalences of language, the critical position outlined above risks ignoring the material effects, as well as the affective impact, of reading, writing, and critiquing. These deconstructive gestures, as Isobel Armstrong convincingly argues, not only “fail to address the democratic and radical potential of aesthetic discourse,” but also — somewhat ironically — engender “politically disabling” effects.8 If the differential premises of the anti-aesthetic camp — insisting on the uncoupling of the aesthetic from the political — may have their uses for contesting the political pieties, or for that matter self-righteousness, of many a (postcolonial) literary critic, they fail to take into account the situated political viability of an aesthetic that foregrounds the material nature of its production, which contests received notions of “reality” and “representation,” and which offers its readers alternative affective — call it literary, imaginative, or textual — ways of becoming-political. Arguments for the absolute autonomy of literature and its relative “revolutionary” potential9 may have some validity on a global political level. But if books and artworks cannot trigger off revolutions or legislate equality, they can effect political thought and reinvigorate dialogue about the possibility of progressive transformations. And while there is a danger in art of aestheticizing the circumstances that need changing, its ability to transcend the ascribed boundaries of the alienated body, the instrumentalized mind, and the unitary self demonstrates art’s potential to seek alliances which exceed and criss-cross available politico-identitarian structures (e.g., nations, classes, races, genders). Revisiting Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of micropolitics — a creative politics of scarcity which works against dominant ideas of reality, imagination, and identity, and is both mindful of social realities and enabling future transformations — can provide productive ways of conceptualizing the intersection of the aesthetic and the political. Regarding “reality” as one of the many possible “actualizations” of a past, and scrutinizing it against its historical emergence, can facilitate the imagining of alternative futures without perpetuating existing inequalities, inflexible ideologemes, or co-optative hegemonies. Micropolitics, in Deleuze and Guattari’s definition, can enable the “fabulation” of a people that is not there yet, that is familiar and yet outside the dominant identitarian and macropolitical paradigms.10 At the same time, micropolitics resists teleology and dialectics; it does not

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offer a solution that accommodates confrontational positions, but instead focuses, as Simone Bignall exemplifies, on the different experiences of a fraught situation, on the different relations to a problematic actuality.11 The micropolitical emphasis on process, experience, and difference (rather than on a solution), on alternative yet historicized pasts and futures (rather than on a harmonious present and future predetermined by the past), enables a negotiable but nonetheless situated understanding of self, history, and agency. Furthermore, the malleability of the micropolitical line can offer a viable alternative to the politics of identity that has proven inadequate in the contemporary condition of diffuse control administered by the liberal democratic mechanism of the nation-state and the neocolonial expansion of capitalism.12 If there is subtle contradiction at the heart of the new order of Empire as Hardt and Negri argue — homogenous in its hybridity, dispersed in its surveillance, emancipatory in its appropriation — the non-dialectical multiplicity of the micropolitical enables dialogue across identitarian lines without obliterating difference (the micropolitical both invokes the idea of a people and displaces it by making the people “missing,” as Deleuze and Guattari state). The haptic as a partial, intimate, and unsettling mode of relating to others is capable of effecting this other, different way of being political. Its investment in tactile and affective epistemologies, as I have discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, challenges the perceived identitarian uniformity and cognitive supremacy of the subject. The multisensory nature of the haptic enables non-appropriative ways of understanding difference; vulnerability becomes a productive epistemological approach of knowing others without depriving them of their opacity and agency. Despite its contestatory function, haptic aesthetics does not merely exclude the optical: even though the focus on the body and the intimate presupposes emphasis on proximity, the haptic look “come[s] close, pull[s] away, and come[s] close again.”13 Neither does it seamlessly co-opt the oppositional stance of the optical into one harmonious whole; rather, the two co-exist on a fraught continuum constantly changing positions. At the same time, the haptic emphasis on the potency of affects and its ability to convey affective truth (because of the indexicality of its multisensory and proximal nature) offer ethical ways of encountering others: resisting the subsumption of the emotive into the cognitive thrust of History as well as avoiding the appropriation of different voices into a seemingly sympathetic but inevitably totalizing stance, haptic writing attends to sutures and wounds without healing them. Haptic aesthetics is inscribed with its own insufficiency, acknowledging the incompleteness of its representation and the impossibility of achieving either sensory plenitude or affective sympathy. And finally, the haptic challenge to normative epistemologies is accompanied

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by the awareness of its inevitable implication in them. Foregrounding friction, gaps, and scars, the haptic disturbs without reconciling, bears witness without exposing, contests without being self-righteous. In this chapter I discuss Ondaatje’s most overtly political novels, In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, as instances of micropolitical haptic writing, insofar as they utilize a set of multisensory aesthetic strategies that detour hegemonic forms of representation, contest the totalizing drive of gender, class, or nationality identity politics, and intimately witness those inhabiting the overlooked corners of society. Consigning agency to the corporeal rather than the idealistic, the micropolitical potential of the haptic is realized by the rendition of the multisensory as a strategy of egalitarian inclusion across identity lines and disruptive contestation of macropolitical paradigms. At the same time, both novels evince awareness of the dangers in celebrating unqualified intimacy, embodiment, and affect; the exigencies of minority politics of identity and the ahistoricity of essential humanism can “betray” the micropolitical transforming it into oppositional identitarianism, social atomism, or cynical complacency. In the Skin of a Lion recounts affectionately the unrecorded lives of Toronto immigrants in the early twentieth century, in an attempt to “betray official history and put together another family.”14 This “betrayal” and “putting together” adhere to the Canadian writer’s already recognizable way of “discovering stories”: muddling temporal and spatial contexts, violating personal and public boundaries, conflating actuality and document with memory and dream, syncopating History to the point of chaos. Ondaatje’s acts of exposure — of the “ex-centrics”15 whose histories have been erased, whose names have been forgotten, whose photos have remained uncaptioned, whose parts have been muted16 — have been recognized as symptoms of the Canadian writer’s political awakening and social engagement.17 His objective to “imaginatively reclaim, without lapsing into moralism or didacticism, those events in Canadian history that were often ignored, overlooked, or slanted,”18 also suggests a different way of being political: one that foregrounds the creative imagination and the affective, one that avoids an exclusionary and totalizing ideological stance, and finally one that cherishes the opacity of being and alternative ways of being together. Betraying the center-periphery trajectory of conventional “class struggle,” the micropolitical stance in In the Skin of a Lion brings together bodies and landscapes, kynical impulses and lofty values. The idiosyncratic family “put together” on the pages of the novel do not subscribe to genealogical principles of belonging or to a uniform political stance. It includes Patrick Lewis, a Canadian born in unmapped Bellrock and subsequently an “immigrant” to industrial Toronto; Clara Dickens, a radio actress and mistress

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of both the searcher Patrick and the millionaire Ambrose Small; Alice Gull, a nun-turned-actress-turned-political activist; Nicholas Temelcoff, a Macedonian immigrant, bridge-daredevil and baker; and David Caravaggio, an Italian bridge-worker and thief. If Patrick’s micropolitical stance enacts the positive aspect of betrayal — the “betrayal” of History, macropolitics, and hegemonic ideology is simultaneously an “un-betrayal” of otherness, intimacy, and difference — Alice’s staunchly oppositional ideology, even if espousing social equality, is blind and reductive to the specificity, difference, and opacity of her followers. Likewise, Caravaggio’s disappearing act recuperates the instrumentalized bodies of laborers and immigrants, whereas the immigrant Temelcoff’s pliability ensures his success as an entrepreneur in the fixed hierarchies of the Canadian mosaic. In unison with his previous projects, Ondaatje’s most acclaimed novel, The English Patient, blends historical and fictional reconstruction with formal experimentation, suggesting that what will follow is an excavation of the “supplementary to the main argument.”19 Set against the backdrop of the Second World War, the novel offers glimpses of the lives of four characters, gathered in an idyllic yet somewhat precarious Italian villa: an anonymous patient burned beyond recognition whom everybody refers to as “the English patient,” a shell-shocked Canadian nurse called Hana, a mutilated thief-turned-spy Caravaggio (both Hana and Caravaggio are characters from In the Skin of a Lion), and an Indian sapper Kirpal Singh (anglicized alias, Kip). The narrative is non-linear and disjointed, following the present and the characters’ memories of the past, and achieving the palimpsest-like effect of the simultaneous presence of multiple temporalities and spatialities, actuality, and virtuality, public history and private stories. The residents of the villa take part in an intimate yet collective re-siting of their stories: destabilizing monolithic History, they acknowledge their own implication in the grand récit of their times; against the bigger historical catastrophes in the background, they place their own personal crises.20 The epic scope of The English Patient, as well as the choice of characters and themes, appears to have not only absolved Ondaatje of his proverbial “apoliticalness,” but almost placed him at the avant-garde of accountable political writing.21 Nonetheless, I want to refine such readings of the novel by arguing that Ondaatje does not relinquish the aesthetic, the personal, and the affective in favor of grand political statements. Rather, his literary close-up on experiences peripheral to major historical events sidesteps the distinction between the public and the private, the historical and the personal, for a more inclusive micropolitical line; the novel, thus, tenderly illuminates the possibilities for the emergence of enabling affective communities and of multiple brands of multisensory, intimate yet disturbing historiographies.

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Ondaatje’s aesthetics, in this sense, does not debunk politics per se, but questions totalizing and essentializing political praxes of alignment. By foregrounding the sensory and affective aspects of ontology and epistemology, his texts suggest that approaching and knowing others involves more than a purely cognitive engagement. Premised on intimate acts of bearing witness to oneself and others, his aesthetico-ethical framework enables micropolitical affiliations; however, it also remains vulnerable to macropolitical and identitarian incursions. Ondaatje’s haptic aesthetics, therefore, draws out both the moment of normative crisis and the moment of normative reappropriation; its micropolitical trajectory is of a tentative and transitive nature, enabling and co-exiting with its own undoing. Thus, the heightened sensuality of The English Patient — through the unsettlingly visible yet unreadable corporeality of the patient — as the most obvious example of the haptic investment in the tactile and the intimate disrupts prescriptive modes of reading and writing, of reality construction and imagining.22 His body is seen as a borderless interface,23 a sign for the arrival of a new age, of “an organic society” premised upon the “postmodern idea of a plural self, and [the] post-national idea of collective identity.”24 On the other hand, it is the patient’s overtly presenced corporeality — “the most complete embodiment of absence and negation”25 — that erases familial, class, religious, and national interpolations. Such metaphoricizations of the body, as Tom Penner concludes, can be a sign of privilege that condones “the eliding of personal [and collective] responsibility.”26 Paradoxically, it is the same body that the patient uses to identify weapons, map the desert, and claim ownership over his lover. Moreover, the patient’s emptied body also functions as a site for identitarian reinscriptions for the residents in the villa: an attempt to “speak back to the center,” such reinscriptions — most notably Caravaggio’s and Kip’s — may end up reproducing the epistemic paradigms they aim to subvert. The last section of this chapter analyses Anthony Minghella’s 1996 film adaptation of The English Patient. Even though the film is not a work exclusively by Ondaatje, who acted only as a consultant in the filming process, I discuss the cinematic artifact in terms of its attempt to approximate, albeit in a different medium, the haptic nature of the novel, while at the same time “betraying” the original under box office pressures. In this sense, the haptic qualities of The English Patient on celluloid contribute both to the micropolitical destabilization of a mainstream film product and to its reterritorialization in the well-established industry of gratifying deferred cinephilic pleasures.

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“A Falling Together of Accomplices” in In the Skin of a Lion: Writing, History, Betrayal In the Skin of a Lion is narrated in retrospect by Patrick Lewis to his adopted daughter Hana during a car journey. Starting with Patrick’s memories of his childhood years in the little known region of Bellrock, the narrative traces his migration to Toronto, where Patrick rises into awareness of the historical plight of immigrants and workers. His work in the tannery and his life amidst the Macedonian community enable Patrick to share their experiences, albeit as an immigrant in his own country — marginalized both by History due to his socio-economic position and by the immigrant community due to his cultural otherness. A crucial element in Patrick’s political awakening is his relationship with Alice Gull, a nun-turned-political activist, who attempts to persuade him to take part in her revolution. Nevertheless, the success of Patrick’s political conversion is questionable, given that the two instances of his activism are his setting on fire the Muskoka Hotel in revenge for Alice’s accidental death (by a misplaced saboteur bomb) and his failed attempt to blast the water filtration plant. Intertwined with this plot line is the story of the Macedonian daredevil Nicholas Temelcoff, whose rescue of an anonymous nun gives birth to the actress and political activist Alice Gull, and whose community facilitates Patrick’s awakening to collective responsibility. Temelcoff’s presence and his rescuing of the nun, just like the presence of the immigrants in Toronto, are either erased from the historical records of the city or given a passing mention in the marginalia. This process of disappearance into darkness is also invoked by the story of the thief Caravaggio, whose understanding of demarcation both emphasizes the presence of invisible boundaries in Canada’s “vertical mosaic,”27 and advocates their active transgression and erasure. In this sense, whereas the whiteness of mainstream Canada and History has sunk the histories of the disempowered into the darkness of oblivion, In the Skin of a Lion creatively manipulates this darkness in order to perform a deft act of historical recuperation. Whiteness — similarly to Billy’s overexposed photograph and Buddy’s silence — becomes a site for the violent inscription of hegemonic “truths”; by foregrounding the landscape of darkness Ondaatje does not victimize the disenfranchized, even if sympathetically, but looks for a space that can enable the subversive contestation of established epistemic and political paradigms. This potential of the darkness is implied at the outset of the novel: the prologue presents Patrick’s retrospective narration in “the early hours of the morning” as an interactive performance in which his adoptive daughter Hana “gathers, [. . .] listens and asks questions.”28 In his turn, Patrick acts like a tentative listener, “pick[ing] up and bring[ing] together various corners

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of the story, attempting to carry it all in his arms.”29 Like Walter Benjamin’s storyteller who shares the experience of storytelling with their audience,30 Patrick and Hana swap authority over the story; Hana initially is a passenger engaged in the reconstruction of Patrick’s life and in the final scene she is the driver adjusting the rear-view mirror, while Patrick is “talk[ing] the gears” and giving the director-like instruction: “Lights.”31 The plural form “Lights” (unlike the divine injunction “Let there be light”) highlights the multiplicity of stories just recounted, whereas the imperative gestures at the shedding of light(s) on histories hitherto left in the darkness. And it is not merely Patrick or Hana who has been involved in the unveiling of the “unbetrayed” histories of Toronto; on the contrary, at various points in the narrative, as I show below, the unhistoricized others shed light on and assume “responsibility for the story.”32 Patrick’s final order, therefore, not only retrospectively comments on the revised version of History offered by the novel, but also acts as an invitation to the reader to revisit the pages already read, to revise the History already told, to remake the forms of representation already accustomed to. Invoking the unreliability of the sense of vision to offer a unified view of a stable referential reality (in other words, optical illusion) in the framing episode of the car drive, In the Skin of a Lion gestures at the stereoscopic nature of its historical revision: not only are there dissimilar versions to be accounted for, but it is also proximity to the events and participants that enhances one’s sensitivity to difference. In his analysis of stereoscopic images, Jonathan Crary points out that the experience of binocular disparity, arising in the apprehension of different images in each eye during perception, conveys tangibility and immediacy rather than likeness. Planar and disunified, stereoscopic images present seeing as the “experience of separate areas”: When we look head on at a photograph or painting our eyes remain at a single angle of convergence, thus endowing the image surface with an optical unity. The reading or scanning of a stereo image, however, is an accumulation of differences in the degree of optical convergence, thereby producing a perceptual effect of a patchwork of different intensities or relief within a single image. Our eyes follow a choppy and erratic path into its depth: it is an assemblage of local zones of three-dimensionality, zones imbued with a hallucinatory clarity, but which when taken together never coalesce into a homogeneous field.33

Once the illusion of unified perspective and fixed external reality is shattered, the viewer is exposed to the embodied and multiple experience of seeing. On the one hand, the stereoscopic nature of human vision presents divergent images to each eye, a discrepancy which increases with proximity to the

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observed event/object and which is corrected by the human brain at the moment of perception. On the other hand, when presented with stereoscopic images the human eyes are at different angles and thus perceive assemblages of hallucinatory three-dimensionality, which stubbornly resist coalescence into homogeneity. In a fashion not dissimilar from the workings of the brain, official History “corrects” and “unifies” the discordances, an act that results in a monolithic exclusionary discourse. In contrast, the act of reading demanded by the framing episode of Ondaatje’s novel is of stereoscopic nature, a reading that alerts the reader to the constructed and synchronized nature of History, a reading that exposes the reader to the contingency and plurality of reality. The exploration of this new vision of the world, just like stereoscopic perception, encourages embodied engagement: it is a reading and a weaving, a discovery and a reinvention. Ondaatje’s reader, just like Hana, embarks on a quest for embodied and pluralized histories, hapticized histories, which entails the reliving of the past and the rereading of pages from history books, “each of them carried by the strength of something more than themselves.”34 The darkness enveloping Patrick and Hana’s car challenges the premises of ocularcentrism: it cannot be permeated by an all-seeing gaze, and this is highlighted both by Patrick’s exhaustion and by the repeatedly asked question, “Do you see?”35 He needs Hana’s assistance for navigation, not only because the landscape outside is impervious to his gaze, but also because he recognizes the opacity of being. Patrick realizes that he needs to act as “a blind man dressing the heroine”36 if the stories he is reinventing are to preserve their ethical integrity and political potential. When translated into narrative terms, this resistance to the ubiquity and autonomy of vision suggests that In the Skin of a Lion will resist an omniscient narrator, a singular storyline, or a prominent protagonist. Halfway through the novel Patrick realizes that [h]is own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices. Patrick saw a wondrous night web — all of these fragments of a human order, something ungoverned by the family he was born into or the headlines of the day.37

The “mural” of Patrick’s story invokes the stereoscopic qualities of the novel; the narrative order to be imposed will not spring from an omnipotent gaze or a transcendental truth, but a kind of humanity that escapes conventional taxonomy, an order that allows for fallibility and mutability. The “accomplice” metaphor resounds with the aforementioned trope of “betrayal.” Patrick’s multiple stories, similar to Lewis Hines’s photographs,

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“betray” the dominant historical discourse by “locat[ing] the evils and find[ing] the hidden purity.”38 At the same time, his discordant, incomplete, and three-dimensional (even tactile) historical reinventions acknowledge the opacity of others without appropriating (“betraying”) their stance or exposing their specificity into an anonymous generality. Allowing the multiple accomplices cum narrative voices to take turns, Patrick’s narrative cum car drive in the dark offers a stereoscopic performance to the reader: a performance in which each participant is able to preserve their opacity from the encroachments of optical History, a performance which “like a tired child tugging us on, not letting us converse with ease”39 assumes a tangible form with a disruptive micropolitical potential. Cultural practices, however, undergo a careful examination in the novel, taking on more sinister meanings. The culture industries are one of the vehicles through which the immigrants in Toronto are expected to assimilate into mainstream Canadianness; theater plays, radio songs, and talking pictures secure the “aliens” with linguistic competence for their successful integration in the host society. This proficiency, at the same time, also provides the marginalized groups with the means for political empowerment. Silent cinema — as a cultural form that does not rely on verbal language — then comes to stand for the terrifying experience of helplessness: The event that will light the way for immigration in North America is the talking picture. The silent film brings nothing but entertainment — a pie in the face, a fop being dragged by a bear out of a department store — all events governed by fate and timing, not language and argument. The tramp never changes the opinion of the policeman. The truncheon swings, the tramp scuttles through a corner window and disturbs the fat lady’s ablutions. These comedies are nightmares. The audience emits horrified laughter as Chaplin, blindfolded, rollerskates near the edge of the balconied mezzanine. No one shouts to warn him. He cannot talk or listen. North America is still without language, gestures, and work and bloodlines are the only currency.40

In a society driven by capitalist accumulation of wealth primarily through rampant industrialization, “language and argument” are seen as the vehicles for sovereignty and progress, whereas the body is merely a site of abuse and exploitation. Silence in this context is regarded as a declaration of irresponsibility and willful resignation to the vagaries of fate and time. This relinquishment of control is suggested in the passage above by the movements of the silent camera — images put together by an external consciousness (the director), following a causal mechanism external to the diegetic space (the amusement of the audience). With controlled precision, Ondaatje’s prose

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conveys the resignation and powerlessness of the characters in the silent films through the listing of noun phrases, and the use of non-finite verb forms and passive voice. And even when the active voice is used, the atmosphere is still one of inevitability and chance. The blindfolded character of Charlie Chaplin is mute and deaf, but so are his spectators: the language at their disposal is gestural, yet the only gesture that has currency in their context is toil and exploitation. Reduced to a wordless cog in the diegetic space of the film and the extradiegetic space of the culture industries, Chaplin’s character is there to be abused by other characters and to amuse the audience with his bodily malapropisms. Ironically and quite poignantly, he is also the mirror in which the immigrants watching can discern their own objectification into cogs of the capitalist machinery. Language deficiency as a sign of political disempowerment can be discerned in the episodes describing the childhood of Canadian Patrick in his native Bellrock. In the little known region where Patrick’s family have settled, Depot Creek, “which did not appear on a map until 1910,”41 there also appear to live equally inconspicuous Finnish loggers, who “don’t know where they are.”42 Their silence brings them closer to the local inhabitants of Depot Creek in terms of their political marginalization by the center. In the opening chapter, “Little Seeds,” Patrick confuses the light from the loggers’ cattails with various bugs of the night. The boy is deliberately looking for the numerous bugs, opening the door to the friendly glow of his kitchen and inviting the inhabitants of the fields to pay a visit. However, the affiliation between Patrick and the Finns is compounded by his relatively more privileged position as a Canadian born. On the one hand, there is the silent group of foreign strangers whom he does not understand because of a narrow “hearing range,”43 hence the need to recourse to the auditory means of his ocarina to complement his deficiency. On the other hand, beckoning at the millions of night bugs to visit him, Patrick becomes the epitome of the Canadian state inviting sojourners from all over the world only to later question their claims to equal citizenship.44 After all, Patrick opens his door to the lighting bugs and enchants them into his kitchen, and yet he is the one who on the night of his discovery of the loggers’ skating amusement “did not trust either himself or these strangers of another language enough to be able to step forward and join them.”45 The suspicion towards the “aliens” is heightened when Patrick realizes that they are having fun along “his shore, his river.”46 The Finnish loggers are not acknowledged in this sense as having rightful claims to the Canadian landscape: their presence is interpreted by Patrick as unsettling “barks” and “axes,”47 rather than the indices of their labor, and is conveniently forgotten once their seasonal work is over.

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In contrast to the linguistic imperative imposed on or at least expected of the immigrants — both for their assimilation and for their political empowerment — Patrick can afford to be “happy” with his “lack of language”48 when he moves to the Macedonian neighborhood of Toronto. His dependence on Hana — the daughter of his lover Alice, whom he adopts after Alice’s death — to interpret for him and his reliance on non-verbal means of communication transform Patrick into a more embodied and vulnerable agent. As much as the horror of the slapstick comedies symbolizes the debilitating silence of disempowerment, during Patrick’s sojourn with the Macedonians, non-verbal sensory exchanges are recuperated as a more pleasurable and inclusive response to the realities of life. Proficient in English only, the Canadian Patrick has felt estranged in the Macedonian community until the moment in the Teck Cinema when he joins the communal laughter and exchanges looks with another viewer. The moment of communication with what is most likely a Macedonian immigrant does not consist of the mutual laughter and oblique glance only, but also of the other’s “body bending forward to look at [Patrick].”49 The projected silent film has been kinesthetically appreciated by both the immigrants and the Canadian Patrick — a bodily appreciation that crosses identity lines and reclaims the abused and silenced body to the realm of pleasure and communication.50 In contrast, the empowering potential of language is questioned by the enforced uniformity in the language school at Central Neighbourhood House: “one pure English voice claiming My name is Ernest, and then a barrage of male voices claiming their names were Ernest.”51 The imitation of the “pure” English voice enables the immigrant community to have a voice and perhaps claim certain rights; however, these claims can only validated by the immigrants’ willing participation in and reinforcement of the existing structural inequalities. Through its implication in the hegemonic paradigm, language appears to lose some of its subversive edge and thus bolster the status quo of inequality; likewise, cultural and aesthetic practices are instrumentalized to serve (macro)political ends, perpetuating the ideological discourses of “normalization” and “naturalization” that Roland Barthes criticizes.52 This is obvious even in Alice’s political drama; for all its vehemence against oppression, her allegorical play stages the disenfranchised workers as a mute and clumsy life-size puppet, whose main response against the oppressive authorities is a series of incomprehensible bangs, grunts, and gestures. The workers’ incapacitation in the diegetic space of Alice’s play is extended to her audience: the flailing arms and banging fists on stage metamorphose into a clapping crowd of naive spectators, who are unable to tell the difference between reality and representation, and routinely interfere with the performance. Alice’s definition of her political art as

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metaphorical of “the grand cause”53 sits uncomfortably — or perhaps very comfortably — with her verdict of the immigrants: “terrible sentimentalists” who “cry all through their sister’s wedding” but who “must turn and kill the animals in the slaughter-houses.”54 Her performative slogan, “name the enemy and destroy their power,”55 demands action through language: the unmasking of the structures of inequality and ideological set-up underlying “normality” involves the ability to ascribe symbolic significance to a political actor (to translate life into language). At the same time, in a fashion similar to Benjamin,56 Alice is suspicious of the aesthetic as passively “maudlin,” broadly humanistic and potentially oppressive, obfuscating as it does the reality of “toil or spin”: I’ll tell you about the rich [. . .] the rich are always laughing. They keep saying the same things on their boats and lawns: Isn’t that grand! We’re having a good time! And whenever the rich get drunk and maudlin about humanity you have to listen for hours. But they keep you in the tunnels and stockyards. They do not toil or spin. Remember that . . . understand what they will always refuse to let go of.57

Nonetheless, while she disassembles mythical structures and exposes inequality, the devotionary-turned-revolutionary can be seen as constructing another myth, that of herself and Patrick as the enlightened “mongrels”;58 distrustful of the aesthetic and the personal, Alice nevertheless appeals to the sentiments of crowds through performance and does not feel “big enough to put someone in a position where they have to hurt another.”59 Her oppositional stance, therefore, is compromised by its own internal inconsistencies and appropriation of hegemonic practices of indoctrination. Insisting on the need to speak out, Alice’s differential politics aims to reinforce the gap between language and body, cognition and feelings, public and private. In contrast, the master of disappearance — the Italian-Canadian thief Caravaggio — offers an alternative which blurs such distinctions without losing its specificity and trenchancy. His thefts defy ownership and challenge demarcation between bodies and properties, instrumental and emotional significance. By painting himself blue and becoming-landscape during his escape from the penitentiary, Caravaggio not only slips through identitarian taxonomy and ocular control (surveillance), but also initiates his own micropolitical discourse of disappearance. Driven by the “humiliation of the [distant] senses,”60 Caravaggio’s subversion reclaims the intimate, the personal, and the sensory, as he carries the smell of “what [he] brushed against”61 and thrives in “available light.”62 Humiliating vision as a vehicle of demarcation and reminiscent of one of the epigraphs of the novel from The

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Epic of Gilgamesh,63 Caravaggio’s thievery and disappearances highlight the importance of intimacy and the corporeal for political praxes.64 The representation of the body as a symptom of disempowerment is also contested by the transformative potential of skin shedding, referred to by Alice in her description of a play, in which “each person had their moment when they assumed the skins of wild animals, when they took responsibility for the story.”65 The “break[ing] through the chrysalis”66 of speech, an embodied claim to the language of empowerment, occurs in several instances in In the Skin of a Lion. A nun falls from the newly built viaduct and, urged to speak by her savior, the Macedonian bridge worker Nicholas Temelcoff, she replaces her robe and rosary with the name of the parrot Alicia and the make-up of the agitprop actress Alice Gull. Patrick divests himself of his aloofness and puts on the skin of a dynamiter and saboteur. And Caravaggio dons the skin color of the penitentiary roof in order to escape the confines imposed on him by a property-obsessed and racist society, and joins Patrick in his attempt to redistribute power and wealth. This agentive function of the body to transform language and politics, however, does not obliterate the fact that it is through the regulation of the corporeal that social and political exclusion operates. With their bodies being constructed as a passive container and a reflective surface, the workmen digging the tunnel under Lake Ontario appear on official photographs with ash-grey faces as if the site of their labor had been imprinted on their bodies. Likewise, tannery dyers leap “into different colours as if into different countries,”67 enacting the “caricature of a culture,”68 whose tokenistic multiculturalism marginalizes those on the fringes: What remained in the dyers’ skin was the odor that no woman in bed would ever lean towards. Alice lay beside Patrick’s exhausted body, her tongue on his neck, recognizing the taste of him, knowing the dyers’ wives would never taste their husbands again in such a way; even if they removed all pigment and coarse salt crystal, the men would smell still of the angel they wrestled with in the well, in the pit.69

The difference inscribed on the workers’ bodies is transferred onto the intimate landscape of their personal relationships; having lost the sense of taste, they absorb the odor of their surrounds and thus become indistinguishable from their contexts. Unlike Caravaggio’s emancipatory becoming-landscape, the dyers’ tenacious olfactory identities convey entrapment. The love scene described in the passage above is tainted by the repulsive smell and taste of brutalization: rather than depicting an amorous experience in an aesthetically pleasing sensual manner, this episode focuses on the sensory experience of

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exploitation, thus lending the private love scene a micropolitical dimension.70 At the same time, reducing the corporeal pleasures of the dyers to their abused bodies is guilty of reification not dissimilar from the one perpetrated by their instrumentalization in capitalist — and even some crude Marxist — ideological discourses. The intensive sensory experiences of the amorous scene not only critique corporeal regulation through the narrative focus on olfactory traces of such control, but they also shift the reader’s attention to the affective potential of the emaciated body which gives the corporeal an existence beyond that of a machine extension. Patrick’s contemplation of the dyers questions both the objectification of their bodies as sites of industrial production and their aesthetic appropriation by artistic discourses — a realization that gestures at the novel’s awareness of its own somewhat complicit position: If [Patrick] were an artist he would have painted them but that was false celebration. What did it mean in the end to look aesthetically plumaged on this October day in the east end of the city five hundred yards away from Front Street? What would the painting tell? That they were twenty to thirty-five years old, were Macedonians mostly, though there were a few Poles and Lithuanians. That on average they had three or four sentences of English, that they had never read the Mail and Empire or Saturday Night. That during the day they ate standing up. That they consumed the most evil smell in history, they were consuming it now, flesh death, which lies in the vacuum between flesh and skin, and even if they never stepped into this pit again — a year from now they would burp up that odour. That they would die of consumption and at present they did not know it.71

The focus on the stories of the immigrant workers and on the imprint of their deprived circumstances onto their emaciated bodies disrupts the precepts of aesthetically pleasing art. The smells and colors of the tannery become the tactile markers of the workers and of their national origins; lesser than the Canadians of British descent, they are misnamed: either given false English names by the labor agent, or addressed by their country of origin. Camerawork and paintbrush appear ill-equipped to capture this abused physicality in an ethical fashion: the “false celebration” of the aesthetic can transform the exploited bodies into an ahistorical object of contemplation devoid of any political agency; in contrast, the evacuation of the personal in historical or political accounts can turn these individuals into “representatives” of a condition and thus deprive them of their opacity and difference. Patrick’s — and Ondaatje’s — dissatisfaction with either mode of representation results in a self-reflexive narrative, wary and critical

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of its own implication in dominant discourses; a narrative that looks for alternative forms of representation that are inclusive and enabling, without sacrificing historical specificity and epistemological ambivalence; a narrative that traces the tensions and gaps without necessarily reconciling them. The series of rhetorical questions, followed by the climactic enumeration of possible answers, incomplete sentences, and parallel clauses reconstruct for the reader the trajectory of these workers’ lives; a trajectory, which while linear — ending with their death — stumbles into repetitions over the spiral of inevitability. The rendition of the Macedonian immigrant community and their embodied displacement of the politics of language seem to offer one such viable alternative. To start with, the choice of this particular community is significant insofar as Macedonia features in the public imaginary as a multi-ethnic bridge within the Europe-Asia bridge that the Balkans are — something that will resonate with an aspiring multicultural Canada.72 However, if celebrated for their multiethnic set-up, the Balkans are also notorious for being the “powder keg” of Europe, bringing connotations of sectarianism, betrayal, and fratricide.73 Centering on the Macedonians in Toronto, In the Skin of a Lion alludes to the celebratory as well as the fraught aspects of multiculturalism, an issue at the forefront of Canadian politics at the time the novel was written.74 The initial encounter of the reader with the immigrant community is conveyed through the gaze of the anonymous Canadian nun (later to become Alice Gull), who having fallen from the newly constructed viaduct is rescued by the Macedonian bridge worker Nicholas Temelcoff. Their entrance into the Ohrida Lake Restaurant is simultaneously shrouded in darkness and abrupt noises: “scream, swing, knock, get me,”75 reminiscent of Ondaatje’s depiction of the silent yet raucous cinematic experiences before the arrival of the talkies. The restaurant, whose name alludes to the powerful medieval city of Ohrid, allows the immigrants to construct an imaginary space for belonging that they are deprived of by historical circumstances: “the boss yelling insults at the waiter, chasing him past customers [. . .] The dark coats of men, the arguments of Europe.”76 At the same time, the guest, the Canadian nun, experiences acute alienation as she is immersed in this somewhat “typically” Eastern corner of the city. The final reference to the power struggles in Europe, also embodied in the dark coats of the noisy customers, implies both the reasons for their immigration to Upper America and the chasm between them and the Canadian nun. The nameless nun’s silent intrusion into the Macedonian communal space and Temelcoff’s inability to tell her his name invoke the lack of language that characterizes the immigrants’ entry in the host country. However, this does not result in their objectification or exoticization. While Kosta and

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his wife Elena rely on body language to communicate with their Canadian neighbor Patrick, Temelcoff has translation dreams in his attempt to find a voice. Similarly to the loggers from Patrick’s childhood, Temelcoff has arrived and lived most of his early immigrant life in Canada in silence and unacknowledgement. Unlike the students at the Central Neighbourhood House, he does not mindlessly repeat the English lyrics he has memorized but strips the language down to its bare bones: “breaking down syllables and walking around as if laying clauses out like tackle on a pavement to be checked for worthiness, picking up one he fancies for a moment then replacing it with another.”77 His language acquisition has been accompanied by a translation of his whole life; language to Temelcoff is not merely an external system of signification to impose on reality in order to control it, but an opaque and dense entity into which he walks and lives. With his newly accumulated knowledge of English, Temelcoff — just like Daniel Stoyanoff before him — becomes equipped to tell the fairy tale of his trip to Upper America. The truth about his life in North America, once retold in the new language, assumes new characteristics, a new accent, different from the standard English–Canadian one. He does not claim to be Ernest, and his “spinner” skills of “link[ing] everyone”78 from the days on the bridge are transplanted into his skills as a baker at his own Geranium Bakery that feeds customers from neighborhoods other than the Macedonian one. Temelcoff thus becomes a well-inscribed immigrant within the Canadian mosaic, and his pleasure in the “metamorphosis of food”79 can be seen as yet another version of his skill to mold himself. The immigrants, however, not only mold themselves in accordance with the givens of the host culture, but also are able to bend and negotiate those givens. This is made prominent in In the Skin of a Lion through Ondaatje’s typographical revision of the English language. The italicized transcriptions of Macedonian words, such as bop (beans), manja (stew), sujuk (sausage with leeks, pork, and garlic), sarmi (cabbage rolls), appear in the novel followed by their English cultural approximations. This triple transformation — transliteration of the Cyrillic script into Latin, its cultural translation, and the typographic emphasis — not only reclaims the dominant language for subversive purposes, as Ashcroft et al. argue,80 but also conveys the immigrants’ accented semi-opacity. Ondaatje’s decision to transliterate the Macedonian words — unlike his reproduction of Sinhalese letters in Running in the Family, which conveys opacity in a more defamiliarizing manner — is indicative of the immigrants’ semi-translated status and Ondaatje’s resistance to their linguistic appropriation in his idiom. While conveying their difference and recognizing their opacity, Ondaatje is wary of the seductiveness of exoticization.

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This is made obvious in the transformations the Canadian-born Patrick undergoes while living among them. When he moves into the Macedonian neighborhood he perceives of his neighbors as his “only mirror”:81 experiencing similar alienation and anonymity to the one felt by the nun in the Ohrida Lake Restaurant. But it is after he discovers the Macedonian equivalent for his blind pet iguana, gooshter (literally meaning lizard),82 that Patrick ascribes a new meaning to the process of translation — linguistic, cultural, social, and political. The translation of the iguana into the Macedonian gooshter parallels Patrick’s translation into the fabric of Canadian society; for it is he, born in Canada and speaking the official language, who feels uprooted and alien — mirroring the iguana’s newfound status amongst the immigrants. At the same time, the resistance to an accurate translation of the word “iguana” into Macedonian vernacular reverberates with the inadequacy of assimilation and othering as policies of sameness, and highlights the relative reinscription that accompanies any cultural translation. This approximate translation, similar to Ondaatje’s transliteration-transcription-translation of Macedonian words in the novel, suggests alternative forms of approaching difference without violating its irreducibility or forcing it into obscurity. Patrick’s conversion into a political agent at the end of the novel is likewise partial and incomplete: driven by his feelings of loss (of Clara Dickens and Alice Gull), he sets the Muskoka Hotel on fire and on his way digresses in order to pay a visit to the Garden of the Blind. In a seemingly lyrical break from the sabotage plot of the novel, Patrick switches roles: from a chetnik, Cato’s successor in Alice’s eyes, to the intimate of a stranger, the blind woman Elizabeth who he meets in the garden. Time freezes and Patrick’s eyes focus on Elizabeth’s searching hands and “darting” green eye “moving with delight over his shoulders, alighting on his ear, his nose.”83 The gentle floating stroke of Elizabeth’s gaze takes Patrick back to Bellrock with his tacit father and silent Finnish skaters. It is a travelling glance that liberates Patrick and the plot from the straitjacket of rigid ideological and narrative logic, and simultaneously with that relating him to the “human” histories of others; it is a blind gaze that allows the incipient revolutionary see his intimate involvement in the histories of others; it is a gaze that questions the potency of omniscience — in art and politics — and recuperates the potential of the corporeal to contain and exchange sensations, memories, affects. His second attempt to be political, the blasting of Rowland Harris’s water filtration plant, is likewise informed by a detour insofar as he falls asleep just before the blast.84 As if corroborating Alice’s fears that he “can be easily harnessed,”85 Patrick’s political fervor seems tamed by Harris’s controlling grip. However, In the Skin of a Lion suggests that Patrick’s sleepiness constitutes a response that is different from the simple reversal of power positions.86

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It sidesteps both the cynicism of the ruling regime and oppositional politics of sabotage. Similarly to his childhood auditory exploration of cow shit, to Alice’s advice to “[roll] in the shit of the enemy,”87 and to Caravaggio’s colleagues, the shitter-thieves who are unable to govern their bodies during a robbery, Patrick’s subversive act responds to his body rather than to Harris’s praise of capitalist initiative or Alice’s lofty politics that “hates the private.”88 His drowsiness draws attention to the forgotten (and despised) body as a viable political agent and as a concrete material site that is brutally abused by the hegemonic regime. Jonathan Crary has attributed the suspension of attention to the crucial role the sense of vision plays in modern practices of the production of subjectivity: Spectacular culture is not founded on the necessity of making a subject see, but rather on strategies in which individuals are isolated, separated, and inhabit time as disempowered.89

While arguing that attentive watching is vulnerable to, enacts, and abets institutional control, Crary also asserts that the multisensory nature of sight enables the evasion of the subjectification process. Thus, Patrick’s “suspension of attention,” his becoming-soporific, constitutes a response different from the binary premises of hegemony and sabotage. In her argument for situated and embodied forms of knowledge, Donna Harraway admonishes: There is a premium on establishing the capacity to see from the peripheries and the depths. But here there also lies a serious danger of romanticizing and/or appropriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their positions. To see from below is neither easily learned nor unproblematic [. . .] “Subjugated” standpoints are preferred because they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective accounts of the world.90

The ideological blindfold of objective knowledge and transparent representation can be easily attributable to majorities and minorities; this, as Deleuze and Guattari, and Hardt and Negri, argue, is not subversive but constitutive of dominant regimes. In the Skin of a Lion highlights such pitfalls of macropolitical indoctrination, without debunking completely political conviction. Instead, by exploring the multiple allegiances into which the characters of the novel enter and by indicating the possibilities of a micropolitics of embodiment, intimacy, and affect, Ondaatje’s novel remains partial. Like Patrick’s blind iguana, In the Skin of a Lion voices the precarious yet productive semi-translatedness of art into politics, of touch into vision, of feeling into reason.

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Between the Grope of the Hand and the Sight of a Rifle: the Betrayal of Propinquity in The English Patient Not unlike The Collected Works and In the Skin of a Lion, The English Patient stages numerous acts of reading that flout normative boundaries and float between the creased and porous skin of the dusty volumes in the Villa San Girolamo, the destroyed skin of the English patient narrating or complementing those volumes, the skin of the page unfolding in front of Ondaatje’s readers. Knowledge and History — embodied in the patient’s copy of The Histories (itself compiled of many a version, story, and gossip) and made “commonplace”91 by his pasted cuttings and random scribbling — are transformed into perishable and permeable texts. Words such as “Libya. A sexual, drawn-out word, a coaxed well [. . .] in which you heard the tongue turn a corner,”92 and “curl, such a slow word, you can’t rush it,”93 transcend the semantic and become indexical of the physical experience of their pronunciation. Likewise, the English patient’s preoccupation with Hana’s reading of Kipling,94 as well as Ondaatje’s inclusion of italicized quotations from The Histories, Kim, Anna Karenina, and The Charterhouse of Parma highlight the intertwined material and experiential aspects of reading and writing. Epitomized by the explorer’s monograph on the Libyan Desert, writing is divested of the distant perspective of a knowledgeable optical gaze and becomes imbued with the intimate ardency of a lover: I worked in the department of Egyptology on my own book, Récentes Explorations dans le Désert Libyque, as the days progressed, coming closer and closer to the text as if the desert were there somewhere on the page, so I could even smell the ink as it emerged from the fountain pen. And simultaneously struggled with her nearby presence, more obsessed if truth be known with her possible mouth, the tautness behind the knee, the white plain of stomach, as I wrote my brief book, seventy pages long, succinct and to the point, complete with maps of travel. I was unable to remove her body from the page. I wished to dedicate the monograph to her, to her voice, to her body that I imagined rose white out of a bed like a long bow, but it was a book I dedicated to a king.95

Infused with the physicality of the desert, Almásy’s entry is also haunted by his carnal love for Katharine Clifton. Her voice, body, and fragrance run out of the fountain pen and resist being tamed by the page or generic norms: in stark contrast with the sharp informativeness of his prose, the explorer is unable to rid his mind and book of the vestiges of Katharine’s fleshy presence — the possibility of a mouth, the color of a stomach, the feel of a knee — or of his lustful affection for her. The impossibility of containing her

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verbally is revealed in Almásy’s inability to frame his feelings in a dedication to his beloved (to be later repeated in his immortalization of Katharine’s body with the colors of the uncontainable desert). In contrast, the eventual dedication of the monograph to a political function, an unnamed (and given Almásy’s alleged Hungarian nationality, perhaps non-existent) king,96 acts as a prolepsis to the proprietary relationship that eventually develops between Katharine and Almásy, just as the explorer’s maps of the Libyan desert forebode territorial conquest and warfare. This textural, hapticized, version of History and knowledge is also enacted by Hana’s immersion in the books she is reading and the patient’s embodied fashion of listening — acts which allow both scarred individuals in the Italian villa to renew their faith in the world surrounding them. Reading enables the shell-shocked nurse to walk through “the only door out of her cell”97 and emerge into “the lives of others.”98 She recedes from the position of a detached reader and flattens the landscape of the books she comes across into her immediate experiences. Hana will insert a passage in Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans about her friendship with Caravaggio and fill in the gaps of a poetry book with her conversations with Kip. The English patient’s edition of The Histories, overflowing with notes from Almásy’s diary and excerpts from the Bible, cigarette paper and maps, is literally “trading legends”99 with its readers. These material exchanges bring patient and nurse closer: while “dragging the listening heart of the young nurse,”100 he is also “swallowing her words like water.”101 Text metamorphoses into texture, reading becomes digestion: So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.102

The recurrent images of webs of roads, threads of tapestries, and plaster of murals convey the osmosis between the textual and the textural; this newfound tactile epistemology opens vistas for caring if cautious relationality between the strangers in the villa. Resembling “a tableau,”103 the extraordinary assemblage of characters brought together in the “propinquity”104 of war thus find solace in each other’s company. Hana and Kip’s “one month of formal celibacy”105 is founded on such an experience of tentatively discovering each other, in contrast to the possessive and predatory love affair between the explorer Almásy and his colleague’s wife Katharine. Reminding him of his childhood ayah and her caressing scratch on his back, Hana’s affection for the sapper Kip is comforting rather

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than demanding. Such intimacy between strangers allows her to enjoy without claiming Kip’s clavicle (as an echo and reversal of Almásy’s mapping and claiming of Katharine’s vascular sizood), the nuances of his brown skin, the strands of his long hair. This openness to their shared vulnerability does not aim for acquisition or control. Respectful of the moats of opacity surrounding their characters — Kip of Hana’s sadness and Hana of Kip’s need for space — the two lovers approach each other, tentative and tender: “[t]hey are never sure what will occur, whose fraction of past will emerge, or whether touch will be anonymous and silent in their darkness.”106 Theirs is a coming together premised on the affinity of suffering and propinquity in difference rather than on proprietary and identitarian claims. The villa, reminiscent as it is of a refuge from the ravages of war, is as permeable, malleable, and disturbing as the hapticized body of History. Its crumbling walls allow the different characters a variety of entryways to a somewhat idyllic sanctuary; but they also mirror the tattered state of humanity, the fragility of war ideology, the abuse and destruction of human lives. Even though the site acts as an enabling extension of Hana’s literary adventures — the nurse uses books to rebuild a staircase as if building a different future, and thus constructing another version of the villa-turned-monastery-turned-hospital-turned-refuge — it is also a battlefield and an appropriate stage for Hana’s emotional outburst against the war. Her condemnation of the rhetoric justifying military violence reveals acute awareness of the events taking place around the Tuscan haven — a haven that itself bears the traces of conflict and destruction: Every damn general should have had my job. Every damn general. It should have been a prerequisite for any river crossing. Who the hell were we to be given this responsibility, expected to be wise as old priests, to know how to lead people towards something no one wanted and somehow make them feel comfortable. I could never believe in all those services they gave for the dead. Their vulgar rhetoric. How dare they! How dare they talk like that about a human being dying.107

The cynicism of the warmongers has permeated Hana’s own brand of humanism: she herself has approached and treated different soldiers as yet another clause on her contract. By shielding herself from anything mortal, cutting her hair, and refusing to look at her reflection in a mirror, the nurse has detached herself from the pain inflicted by war and simultaneously with that provided indirect support for the destruction of more bodies, to which she no longer related as distinct personalities.108 Hana’s realization of her complicity in the cynical exercise of preserving life marred by war in order to interrogate

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it for information (as is the case with the English patient) or to send it back to the battlefields (as is the case with the numerous soldiers she has treated during the Italian campaign) has plunged her into a state of apathy and despair, which define her sojourn in the villa. During the celebrations of her twenty-first birthday and the forty-fifth year of the twentieth century, when the coming of age promises new wisdom, she stages a replay of the hopeful Marseillaise performance from her childhood: She was singing it as if it was something scarred, as if one couldn’t ever again bring all the hope of the song together. [. . .] Singing in the voice of a tired traveller, alone against everything. [. . .] There was no certainty to the song anymore, the singer could only be one voice against all the mountains of power. That was the only sureness.109

Her hand, once passionately thrust against her heart, now barely makes it out of her pockets. Five years earlier the “new language” of “Alonson fon!”110 effortlessly enthused the audiences with its message; on the eve of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hana’s slumber into exhaustion does not reaffirm hope in the future nor does it celebrate a post-war “oasis society.”111 Rather, it silently bears painful witness to the mutilations inflicted by ideologies of identitarian supremacy; mutilations reflected in the fragmented novel, its ruined setting and scarred characters; mutilations afflicting the characters’ desire for escape or quest for reidentification. The intimacy of strangers in the Italian villa, in this sense, is inextricable from its historical surrounds — the propinquity to events that atomize, disintegrate, and destroy communities. If gesturing at a new kind of epistemology that will foster a new appreciation of the opacity of difference and the self’s vulnerability to others, The English Patient never loses sight of the overbearing presence of History and the crippling heritage of identitarian epistemologies. At the end of the novel, when in a cinematic cross-cutting sequence Kip, self-renamed into Kirpal Singh, sees Hana in Canada, he cannot but realize that “[t]his is a limited gift he has somehow been given, as if a camera’s film reveals her, but only her, in silence.”112 Reminiscent of their tentative intimacy in the villa, Kirpal’s close-up of Hana is partial, echoed in the narrator’s confession of her unknowability: “She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing.”113 While suggesting continuity, this image also reinforces the gap between their distinct existences — Hana and Kirpal are not after all brought into the same frame. In a similar fashion, the haptic look of Ondaatje’s novel relinquishes the seamlessness of authorial control, and with the painful vulnerability of an intimate glance caresses wounds and sutures. Like the fork dropped by Kirpal’s daughter, it draws

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connections (metamorphosing into a dislodged glass) and causes punctures (the cutlery is after all compared to cumbersome “large weapons,”114 whose malfunctioning brings about the wrinkle of a smile on Kirpal’s face). And it is this partiality of the novel’s haptic look — in the sense of intimacy as well as resistance to smoothing over — that allows for the simultaneous recognition of a variety of histories and epistemologies on the page. As someone who “inhales” knowledge, someone who has been entered by History,115 the English patient’s readings are far from simply intuitive or harmless. Burned to “the colour of an aubergine,”116 the unidentifiable man lacks the boundary of his skin, just as the room where he is lying and the desert he remembers lack demarcation. At the same time, it is by resorting to his exposed corporeality that the patient is able to get his bearings after the crash that the novel opens with: identifying the surrounding flavors of breath, tastes of saliva, patter of running feet, the man is trying to catch a minute recognizable trace which would make “the map of the world [. . .] slide into place.”117 Unlike conventional modes of knowledge acquisition in which eyesight (opticity) precedes the intimacy of tactility, with the English patient it is primarily the proximal senses of touch, smell, and taste that help him interpret his whereabouts and companions. He engages in tactile translation of the buried guns for the Bedouin tribe that rescue him (after his airplane catches fire and crashes in the desert), in olfactory investigation of the merchant doctor who “anointed” his body,118 in gustatory acquaintance with Hana and the silent Bedouin carer, who chew his food for him. This sensually acquired knowledge is partial; for all his desert expertise and accumulated sensory data, the patient is unable to name the nation to which his saviors belong. The suspension of the omniscient gaze is also mirrored in the initial anonymity of the patient, Hana, and Caravaggio: while Hana and Caravaggio’s names are revealed in the second chapter, “In Near Ruins,” the identity of the patient remains uncertain until the end. The semi-identifiable patient has, correspondingly, an uncontained and permeable body, which absorbs the masks of the Bedouin healer as swiftly as it swallows Hana’s words. The central role of the corporeal in The English Patient, both as a form of embodied engagement with the world and as an experiential engagement with art, invokes agency informed by vulnerability. Nonetheless, the bodily is not immune to the incursions of war politics (as Hana’s outburst testifies) or instrumentalization by optical knowledge. One of the first images from the English patient’s past that the novel recounts is his recollection of himself identifying weapons for the Bedouin tribe, which results in him being utilized as a tool by a tribe that the cartographer Almásy has admired as untouched by modern age nationalism. Earlier in the novel, human hands are compared to dog’s paws on the basis of olfactory similarity:

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[Hana’s] father had taught her about hands. About a dog’s paws [. . .] This, he would say, as if coming away from a brandy snifter, is the greatest smell in the world! A bouquet! Great rumours of travel! She would pretend disgust, but the dog’s paw was a wonder: the smell of it never suggested dirt. It’s a cathedral! her father had said, so-and-so’s garden, the field of grasses, a walk through cyclamen — a concentration of hints of all the paths the animal had taken during the day.119

In a text where the divisive and proprietary practices of colonialism feature as main themes, hands — the human extension most easily associated with grasping, acquisition, violence, and rapaciousness — are invested with another, more communal meaning.120 Not only are human hands merged with dog’s paws, thus bringing the two species together in one sensitized tactile interface, but they are also impregnated with the symbolism of a non-aggressive container of traces, caress, and comfort. Moreover, contrary to their usually active role, hands in this passage relinquish control to smell and kinesthetics, touch, and aurality: they are imbued with the fragrances of all the paths their owner has walked and the whiffs of random gossip s/he has collected. The repulsion associated with animal corporeality has metamorphosed into adoration: by the invocation of the image of the Christian cathedral, the dog’s paws are “purified” and the feelings experienced are exalted to a kind of sensual transcendentalism. For all the renunciation of authority and power, hands for the blindfolded English patient seem to have retained what Jacques Derrida calls their role to act before, to “anticipate” and “precipitate”: on the one hand, hands act as a safeguard as they rush ahead (precipitate) in order to protect the head (and the unseeing eyes); on the other hand, they take the initiative (anticipate the action) prior to the head (and instead of the unseeing eyes).121 In Derrida’s comparative analysis between blindness, art, and self-portraiture, the hands of the blind, just as the hands of the artist engaged in self-representation, act as if “a lidless eye had opened at the tip of the fingers”:122 thrust forward they explore and caress the environs (the canvas), trying to recollect and recognize (precipitate and anticipate) in their role of a tactile scribe mediating between artist/blind person and portrait/environs. The artist in this framework relinquishes optical control and acts as “someone who takes away sight in order finally to show or allow seeing and to bear witness to the light.”123 Hands in this context perform from memory and in anticipation, bringing past and future together, tracing graphically mental trajectories, bearing witness without seeing. The patient’s “blind” translation of the Bedouin guns, as well as his childhood games of Pelmanism with his aunt, however, present another, more

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sinister aspect of the grope. The superimposed images of the patient translating rifles for the Bedouin tribe amidst the ravages of war and the patient playing a game with his aunt in the peaceful landscape of a country house approximate each other in their ultimate aim: to fully name the world. Hands reveal themselves to be intricately related to the acquisition of knowledge and the exercise of power: no longer spreading rumors of the paths walked or landscapes seen, hands relinquish the Pelmanism of storytelling for the Pelmanism of territorial claims. As much as hands can act as relational prostheses, they can also be utilized as lethal projectiles. Similarly to the duality in vision — between the ominous “disembodied cyclopean eye, detached from the observer, possibly not even a human eye” and the fallible and ephemeral qualities of the human eyes124 — the tactile hands like “a lidless eye” can function both as an impermeable armory separating self from other, and as the conduit for a desubjectified assemblage of bodies, discourses, desires. Mapping deserts, rifles, and bodies, then, is a more precarious type of knowledge than the childhood game of Pelmanism suggests. The desert, idealized as resistant to containment and charting, has succumbed to the nomenclature drive of which the cartographer Ladislaus de Almásy and his fellow explorers are an indelible part. The patient’s willful anonymity resounds with his plea for a non-identitarian existence, beyond family and nation: The desert could not be claimed or owned — it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names [. . .] I didn’t want my name against such beautiful names. Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert.125

As a stance, however, it clashes with Almásy’s mapping activities. The stark contrast between the shifting desert, with its numerous winds, infinite sand dunes, endless caravans, and the sterile well-charted space of European states, underlines the patient’s blindness to the project his explorations have assisted. His inability to distinguish between the romanticized North African desert of his imagination and the geopolitical scene of the European war is condemned. Although the explorers see themselves as “disappearers,” they are also the charters that transform the desert into a stage for identitarian warfare. Within the power struggles of the Second World War the cartography of the Libyan Desert becomes a symbol of appropriation and annihilation. Naming is another strategy of acquisition imposed on the desert by vain explorers wanting their mark left behind. The mythical oasis of Zerzura with all its denominations — “The Oasis of Little Birds,” “The City of Acacias,” “white as a dove”126 — somewhat resists this proprietary drive, its names used instead as the indices of an anonymous poet’s desire:

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There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own. Someone seen bathing in a desert caravan, holding up muslin with one arm in front of her. Some old Arab poet’s woman, whose white-dove shoulders made him describe an oasis with her name. The skin bucket spreads water over her, she wraps herself in the cloth, and the old scribe turns from her to describe Zerzura.127

Superimposing different spatial and temporal settings, being at the intersection of a communal historiography and a private love affair, this syncretic naming process celebrates the propinquity between the body of the lover and the body of the desert, the inextricability of cognition and affect: the bucket of water translates into the skin of the woman, the white shoulders of the woman into the texture of the map. This process is somewhat reversed when Almásy translates his lover’s body, that of Katharine Clifton, into the landscape of the desert, making it “a naked map where nothing is depicted.”128 Daubing the colors off the walls of the Cave of Swimmers onto Katharine’s dead body, the explorer wants to eternalize her corporeality by impregnating it with the physicality of the desert; but unlike the charting activities for the Nazis, his cartography of Katharine contains no boundaries or names. Renouncing any forms of identitarian belonging, Almásy’s strives for depersonified corporeality conveyed through the disassembly of his lover’s body into pigments and pollen. But, then, it is his cartographic skills and impolitic misuse of a name that has made the explorer simultaneously an attractive and dangerous target for Germans and Allies, and by extension the vehicle for destruction (of Katharine, the desert, and all those involved in the conflict). In a somewhat different manner, Kip’s “rogue gaze”129 also extends a hapticized eye into a projectile hand to be used as a weapon. Kip’s three-dimensional gaze allows him to discern “all the false descants”130 beneath the surface of the bombs he defuses, which reveal “the motives and spirit behind any invention.”131 Like Hana, who studies her patients through their bodies, Kip gets to know the personality of his enemies through the maps of their character encoded in their bombs. His gaze, groping for the intention of others, reverses the precipitate/anticipatory role of the English patient’s Pelmanism. It is through Kip’s idiosyncratic rifle sight that a sideways reversal of the optically informed colonial power dynamic takes place. Observing instances of canonical European art through the sight of his gun, the sapper finds in them the order and comfort that the war has shattered. Rather than contemplating these artifacts reverently from a distance, however, he will hoist himself up against the face of the Queen of Sheba on the fresco in the church of Arezzo, resting his brown hand on her frail pale

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neck. Similarly, during the Marine Festival in Gabicce, the Virgin Mary statue coming out of the sea does not instill awe in Kip as much as it asserts the value of his own faith and invokes a sense of intimacy. But it is in the deserted Naples, in the church of San Giovanni a Carbonara, that the sapper finds human company in the terracotta figures of The Annunciation. Relinquishing his proverbial suspicion and alertness, the diligent student of Lord Suffolk succumbs to tiredness. In the climactic scene when the electricity of booby-trapped Naples is about to be switched back on and probably blow up the city, the sapper — like the failed saboteur Patrick in In the Skin of a Lion — falls asleep. Looking for comfort in art forms that are implicated in the imperialist regimes that have triggered off the war, brought him to Italy, and rationalized the taking of human lives, Kip tacitly acknowledges his own complicity by seeing himself as part of their representation. On the one hand, the terracotta figures of Mary and the angel present to the sapper a domain in which he can transcend the identitarian logic of the raging conflict and be part of a universal humanity beyond national or racial boundaries. On the other hand, Kip’s reenactment of Christian motifs, falling asleep under the protection of the Virgin and the guardian angel, perpetuates a colonial power dynamic, wherein the causes of the same armed conflict lie. For all its haptic and micropolitical dimensions, Kip’s rogue gaze, similarly to the English patient’s blind Pelmanism, cannot be divorced from the macropolitics of the time, the optical impulse to define, isolate, fix, and mark. The sapper gains passage into the “family” of Lord Suffolk and his bomb disposal squad, aware that what hinders him is his sense of “Singh. And the ambiguities,”132 his initial inability to define himself against an other, his inability to embrace the identitarian imperative of the modern Western soldier: “You have one enemy. You have no partner.”133 The military injunction to sever any communal or personal ties is complemented by the cynical devaluation of human life in the bomb defusing squad. The right choice that the sappers are expected to make, whether to trigger off an explosion or not, depends on a quasi-scientific formula with the variable values of X, Y, and V, standing for man’s life, risk, and estimated damage, respectively. What comes to define Kip’s sense of belonging during his service with Lord Suffolk is solving the problem of destruction by achieving the best values in the formula. Lives are reduced to symbols, relationships to mathematical functions. The sapper’s thriving in the economics of identitarian thought is only facilitated by the crystal set, “something equivalent to white sound to burn or bury everything.”134 Similarly to Temelcoff’s infatuation with North American songs in In the Skin of a Lion, Kip’s immersion in the “white sound” of music secures him with a false sense of order and clarity, drowning

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his ambiguities into the white logic of instrumentalized and dehumanized life. When the news of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki reaches the four residents in the villa, the cocoon with which music has secured Kip during his readings of unknown other sappers is penetrated by the “voices of abstract order”: All those speeches of civilisation from kings and queens and presidents . . . such voices of abstract order. Smell it. Listen to the radio and smell the celebration in it.135

Defying the duplicity of imperialist discourse, and its rhetoric of progress and modernity, Kip exposes the sterility of “white sound” and orders the patient to an olfactory and gustatory tasting of the bomb experience. The offensive multisensory cross-cutting sequence between the radio broadcast, the charred body of the English patient, and the thousands of Asian bodies burning in the nuclear apocalypse hapticizes a scene which, if narrated with the impartiality of a detached observer, will fail to deliver the horror of the experience. This disturbing multisensory image rubs against the abstract identitarianism of optical binaries: the bodies that burn in Asia are brown, just as the voices infiltrating hatred are white. Kip’s breakthrough through the aural distance of the radio device challenges the digestion of this experience as a mere piece of news or an impartial military strategy. Offending the proximal senses of the English patient with the odors of burning flesh, the Indian sapper thus builds a continuum between the brown and desensitized tactility of the dying “white” man, and the bodies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, cumulatively reduced to dispensable color and skin. In contrast to the patient’s anti-nationalist romance with the desert, war is premised on clear-cut identitarianism, which is violently imprinted on the corporeal. Somewhat ironically, the self-proclaimed nationless patient is “read” by his interrogators as having “tarred black” skin and “very English” manners and accent.136 His aristocratic title, refined manners, and love for “his English garden with its phlox” are also sufficient markers for his fellow residents Caravaggio and Kip to categorize the burned man as a member of that decadent category of “inky-dinky parlez vous.”137 However, Ondaatje’s choice of the patient’s ambiguous identity, claimed by both the English and the German forces, and yet most likely to be Hungarian, has significance beyond a postcolonial condemnation of his complicitous cosmopolitanism. Indeed, Steven de Zepetnek has suggested that the indeterminacy of the character’s national identity is an instance of “Ondaatje’s exploration of otherness.”138 That the patient is a charred black body, usually associated with images of darkness and semi-darkness,139 suggests that the difference

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between the “white nations” and the “brown races” is more complicated than the racialized binaries of imperial center vs. colony, or European vs. non-European. It invites the interrogation of the homogeneity of each of the poles of this binary and their reduction to a racial category. To start with, the ambiguity is reflected in the setting of the novel in Italy — the cradle of both fascism and Renaissance — which foregrounds the violence of Europe’s civilizational impetus, imperial projects, modern nation-states, and nationalist ideologies. Furthermore, the patient’s possible Hungarian origin and British, as well as German, loyalties do not merely signify the breakdown of European empires140 or a privileged colonial mentality, but also gesture at a specific geopolitical locus fraught with the tensions of multicultural, nationalist, and irredentist ideologies.141 The embodiment of “white” values of aristocratic genealogy and imperial gracefulness, the knowledgeable definer of colonized spaces and histories, the patient is also a repulsive unidentifiable and uncontainable “ebony pool,”142 whose questionable Europeanness (multicultural, dark, and contiguous with the Ottomans) threatens to destabilize any recognizable identity parameters. It is this liminal identity that feeds into Caravaggio’s discomfort with the patient. A former thief, who escaped from prison by painting himself blue and merging with the penitentiary roof in In the Skin of a Lion, Caravaggio has practiced a type of thievery that approximates the character of his victims. His penchant for choreographing his surrounds has made him a professional “disappearer,”143 a precarious form of becoming to which his hyphenated status of an Italian-Canadian has contributed as well. Hana’s memories of the avuncular Caravaggio suggest that his has been an idiosyncratic form of thievery: “He was too curious and generous to be a successful thief. Half the things he stole never came home.”144 An “evasive man,”145 a transgressor of fixed identities, his worst fear is to be contained. With the onslaught of the war, however, the quintessentially uncontained and uncontainable thief-artist is given an official identity, absolved of his crimes, and turned a patriotic citizen. With the war Caravaggio seems to have undergone a qualitative transformation: from a generous, idiosyncratic, and somewhat anarchist thief to a legitimized thief of information, stealing for the machine of the state. From an artist relishing darkness for the transgressive possibilities it offers, he has mutated into an artist who illuminates in order to expose and fix. If his intimate thefts of optical defiance evinced a micropolitical potential, the war effort appears to have co-opted his stance into the macropolitics of the day. The reduction of Caravaggio’s thievery to orchestrated state-sponsored espionage deprives him of the agency he has enjoyed in Canada. Thus, when he is caught in “midair” and “mid-step” by a photograph and a woman’s gaze, Caravaggio’s fate is inevitable: not only are his image and identity fixed

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and made recognizable, but his body is imprinted with a permanent difference — his thumbs are chopped off.146 During his stay in the villa the former thief recurrently expresses skepticism if not outright disgust with identitarian thought, and especially its appropriation of affective outlets as displayed in patriotism and loyalty. Seeing any form of proprietary claims — material, national, or emotional — as a corruptive practice that benefits the rich and powerful, Caravaggio reiterates Alice’s ideological lessons about authority and Patrick’s disillusionment with organized political praxes. For him, just like for Hana, desertion and irresponsibility are the only viable roads to freedom. Caravaggio’s suspicion towards military appeals to patriotic feelings, however, is accompanied by a recurrent need to reinforce identitarian categories. His obsession with the English patient’s identity reflects the former thief’s quest to put a face and body to the disembodied voice that has been giving instructions over the telephone during his torture and interrogation. In contrast, the patient’s voice gives presence to an almost destroyed, but nonetheless quite intensely present, body. In this way, the patient is both a passive body with which Caravaggio identifies, and an inflictor of pain, a disembodied voice, in which the mutilated spy sublimates his shame and anger. The quest for a fixed identity informs the behavior of the Indian sapper Kip as well. Upon his arrival in England, Kirpal Singh is translated into Kip, reminiscent of the English word for a fish but also of the colonial writer Rudyard Kipling. In spite of his translation into Englishness, Kip is aware that “he remained the foreigner, the Sikh.”147 He assumes the precarious ambivalence of the colonial subject, which reforms his difference into a palatable similarity that also claims recognition.148 On the one hand, Kip is adopted in Lord Suffolk’s “family” and follows the codes of his “English fathers [. . .] like a dutiful son.”149 On the other hand, Kip’s emulation of British culture and penchant for the “overlooked space open to those [. . .] with a silent life”150 can be seen as his own micropolitical position. Avoiding the confrontational practice of his openly anti-British brother, Kip has opted for invisibility. The validity of invisibility as a political stance is confirmed by its resistance to the colonial urge to mark, inscribe, and racialize difference in order to successfully exert control. At the same time Kip’s invisibility retains the traces of identitarian visibility: upon joining the army as a sapper, Kip is marked with a yellow chalk line, thus reinforcing both the presumed difference of his body and his colonial disenfranchisement. By “betraying” (exposing) difference such visibility simultaneously relegates Kip to the general pool of insignificant (invisible) others, to the ranks of universal and essentialized difference. It is upon hearing the apocalyptic news about Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Kip relinquishes his flirtation with Englishness and embarks upon a

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process of identitarian reinscription, which will lend him political visibility. The “tremor of Western wisdom”151 shakes the sapper into confronting what is to him the epitome of white imperial universality, the patient. In his memories of the desert the English patient repeatedly focuses on his repugnance for national belonging and his celebration of international non-identitarian community: “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.”152 If the English patient’s response to identitarianism is informed by his Eurocentric brand of humanism, Kip’s response to the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is rooted in his repugnance for the racialized forms of European control and white supremacy as the invisible (universal) standard, “American, English, I don’t care. When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you’re an Englishman.”153 The English patient’s celebratory nationless designation of the explorers is contested by Kip: he interpellates the allegedly invisible “white” nations but also erases the differences amongst them, he makes them visible while plunging them into the invisibility of an abstract generalization. His “speaking back” is supplemented by him returning to the Punjab and embarking on a process of self-indigenization. Despite Kip’s and Caravaggio’s identitarian reinscriptions, which are premised on a compromised exclusionary logic, and despite Hana’s humanist despair over partisan conflicts that make everyone complicit, there remains hope for discrete if partial relationality amongst different selves across various contexts. Sitting in his garden in the Punjab years later, Kirpal sees Hana; the cinematic cut to Canada — conveyed through the dislodging of a glass and the catching of a fork — implies the partial superimposition of Kirpal’s life as a doctor with a family onto Hana’s life of solitary idealism, a literary montage technique warranted by their past together in Italy and their presents separately in the Punjab and in Canada. If identitarian epistemologies have widened the distance between them and made each of them complicit with the cynicism of war ideology, it is the ability to maintain the intimacy of strangers and the comforting love of someone outside the family that will ensure their continued, albeit partial, relationality. And if the patient’s questionable borderless stance has faded out, in a fashion echoing Katharine’s dissolve into the colors of the Cave of Swimmers, the soft focus cross-cutting technique gestures at how propinquity in difference can be achieved. As evidence of the care provided by commanders for their soldiers during the Italian campaign, the Directorate of Public Relations in London summed up: The Allied Commanders, unlike the Wehrmacht leaders, had nursed their formations, interspersing operational tours with rest and training periods.

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They had been chary of expending lives to-day when bombs and shells might save them to-morrow.154

This brand of military cynicism whereby macropolitical concerns justify the “heroic” destruction of lives, bodies and casualties are translated into numbers, and taxonomies of “the enemy” and “the ally” breed alienation and paranoia, triggers off the desire of the four strangers in Villa San Girolamo to betray and desert the ideological slogans that have brought them there. Promulgated loudly as “Democracy’s David fac[ing] a Fascist Goliath,”155 the war loses its clear-cut binary parameters for the residents of the villa. For just as the English patient observes with respect to (historical) Caravaggio’s self-portrait David with the Head of Goliath,156 the artistic self-decapitation on the canvas presents a self that partakes both of a defiant David and of a vainglorious Goliath. The boundaries between the hegemonic and the subversive, then, are simultaneously blurred and reinforced: if the dying patient claims a broadly defined affinity with the sapper as “international bastards,”157 Kip’s outburst marks the gaps and gashes in this presumed affinity that have come through a colonial context. Rather than looking for the identity of the bodiless head as Caravaggio does,158 the novel’s concluding image suggests that a quest for relationality will enact the proximity in difference that a micropolitical re-vision of History reaches out for.

Betrayals of the Cinematic: Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient Not very long after Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient won the Booker Prize in 1993, the production of its film adaptation began. With Anthony Minghella’s screenplay, produced by Saul Zaentz and distributed by Miramax, the film, bearing the same title as Ondaatje’s novel, won nine Academy awards in 1997. Despite being one of the most popular independent productions, Minghella’s The English Patient has been criticized for its unfaithful rendering of Ondaatje’s “original,” for its ambiguous political affiliation with the interests of liberal Western audiences, and for its prioritization of romance over the historical responsibility of colonial powers, Second World War players, and in particular the dropping of the H-bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the latter being edited out from the screenplay).159 Ondaatje’s involvement in the filming process as a consultant and sanction for the adaptation — mentioned in both his book on the editor Walter Murch and in the preface to Minghella’s screenplay — has resulted, as Gillian Roberts concludes, in a new type of fidelity criticism directed

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towards the Canadian novelist, rather than towards the cinematic product itself, despite the significantly more blurred notion of authorship when it comes to film products.160 As a counterbalance to the negative response to the film, especially from postcolonial and fidelity criticism quarters, others have challenged the crude ideologization of Ondaatje and his novel,161 as well as the formally insensitive dogmatism of fidelity criticism.162 In this sense, Hsuan Hsu’s proposal to talk about the film as exhibiting a new form of cinematographic “transitorial” ethics addresses the concerns of both critical camps. He analyses the non-appropriative cinematic aesthetics of the film — which he terms “transitorial” — as a qualitatively different response to the acquisitive prescriptions of the colonial gaze: Instead of colonialist travelogues, which gaze unseen upon foreign geographies in order to gain knowledge and power over them, a transitorial cinema caresses and illuminates its objects without denying the embodied nature of its look: it travels through unmapped landscapes and leaves them unmapped.163

Minghella’s adaptation therefore needs to be analyzed not only against Ondaatje’s novel for significant deviations, but also mapped in view of the aesthetics of its medium and the affective impact on the spectators. George Bluestone’s admonition against facile comparisons between the literary and cinematic mediums is relevant in this respect, insofar as it gives us some clues about the perceived inferiority of the film adaptation to the novelistic “original”: These standard expletives and judgements assume, among other things, a separable content which may be detached and reproduced, as the snapshot reproduces the kitten; that the incidents and characters in fiction are interchangeable with incidents and characters in the film; that the novel is a norm and the film deviates at its peril [. . .]. What is common to all these assumptions is the lack of awareness that mutations are probable the moment one goes from a given set of fluid, but relatively homogenous, conventions to another; that changes are inevitable the moment one abandons the linguistic for the visual medium. Finally, it is insufficiently recognized that the end products of novel and film represent different aesthetic genera, as different from each other as ballet is from architecture.164

Cinematic dependence on literary sources and techniques has been recognized by film pioneers such as D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein;165 however, it is important to acknowledge the inherent difference between the verbal-conceptual nature of literature and the audio-visual-verbal nature

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of cinema. The simultaneity of perception and apprehension of films may appear as less constrained by cognitive maps than the delayed visualization and varied paces of apprehension of literary texts; however, response to the affective charge of cinematic artifacts cannot but be conditioned by the contemporary cultural climate. With reference to that, Brian McFarlane suggests that in addition to the transfer of elements from one signifying system to another in the novel-to-film translation, the social, historical, and political contexts need to be considered. The literary source may appear to be just one layer of the film’s palimpsest nature, but the adaptation is by no means a lesser discursive structure than a literary text is.166 Notwithstanding these caveats, Minghella’s The English Patient merits an analysis of its translation of Ondaatje’s haptic writing, both in terms of its aesthetic qualities and in terms of its ethical and micropolitical potential. To start with, the emphasis in the film on tactility reverberates with the multisensory and intimate nature of Ondaatje’s text. Likewise, the fluid montage, variety of angles and shots, effective lighting and soundtrack, all contribute to the construction of a fragmented yet perceptually sensitive filmic experience, which conveys sensory and affective interventions in what can be otherwise construed as a regular form of mainstream entertainment. And even though the director’s decision to drop or edit some scenes and to modify characterization blunts the postcolonial edge of the novel,167 the formal features of Minghella’s adaptation produce subtle effects that approximate the malleable, intimate, partial, and processual nature of Ondaatje’s aesthetics. Likewise, while acknowledging the ethical and micropolitical potential of proximity, opacity, and affect in the process of approaching and knowing others, the film adaptation foregrounds the inevitable incursions of optical epistemologies and identitarian macropolitics. Even before the credits start, the viewers are presented with a close-up of a hand engaged in the drawing of what subsequently appears to be a human figure diving. Supple, fragmentary, and suggestive, the narrative is woven from a large number of flashbacks and flashforwards, dissolves, and cuts. The numerous close-ups on faces and bodies not only draw attention to the essentially physical nature of the filmic event, but also act on the viewer by suggestion and implication without revealing the entirety of the image. The delayed decoding of certain shots — for instance, the opening aerial shot of the desert merging into the image of bodies lying next to each other, or the close-up of Katharine’s finger drawing on a car’s window during a sand storm — slows down the pace of the film, plunging the viewer into a mise en abyme, a Deleuzean time-image, outside the causal logic of a plot-driven film. It is only after the accidental discovery of the Cave of Swimmers (halfway through the film) that a viewer unfamiliar with Ondaatje’s novel will realize

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that the hand belongs to Katharine Clifton and the drawings in the opening shot are a replica of the wall paintings in the cave where she dies. Similarly, the diving figure implies a fall, which is a prolepsis to the next scene: the close-up of the drawing surface gradually dissolves into an aerial shot of the desert, with dunes resembling human bodies lying close to one another. The diving figure, then, is seen floating over the dunes and gradually fading into a shadow to finally dissolve into the contour of a plane. The dissolve between the close-up of the drawing hand and the long shot of the desert bodyscape is accompanied by a female voice singing in a foreign (non-English) language what could be crudely described as an “oriental tune.” These opening dissolves lack demarcation: bodies painted on a cave wall float on a page, which dissolves into the parchment of the desert; the two-dimensional figures fade into ghostly shadows, whose floating dance is transformed into a roaring flight, and whose physicality becomes the machinery of an airplane. Such mergers between the corporeal and the machinic, the fictional and the factual, are paralleled by the multisensory ambience invoked by the cinematic aesthetic. However, the lack of demarcation between bodyscape and landscape is soon to be problematized: the first shot of the explorer Almásy shows him using the outline of a female body to map mountain ranges in the desert. The mapmaker instrumentalizes the corporeal turning it into an abstract symbol; containing it in his notebook, he enacts the appropriative gaze of desert cartography and gestures at his future possessive attitude towards Katharine. In a similar vein, the Szerelem, Szerelem opening tune is transformed into a token for national belonging: its initial unidentifiability is deconstructed when Almásy plays the song explaining to Katharine that his daijka used to sing it to him in Budapest.168 Not only does he identify the tune that has accompanied the sweeping shot of the desert — suggesting that the desert too will be conferred a national identity — but it is also in the same revelatory scene that he lays claims to parts of Katharine’s body: her shoulder blade and her suprasternal notch. Thus, landscape, bodyscape, and soundscape, initially perceived as sites of unbounded becoming, corporeality, and affect are appropriated and instrumentalized by the identitarian logic of belonging and ownership. The gradually rising preoccupation with naming and mapping parallels the approaching war wherein identities need fixing, allegiances declaring. As a lover cum explorer, Almásy claims Katharine’s body, just as Madox, explorer-turned-loyal British subject, claims His Majesty’s maps; what Almásy initially named “the Almásy Bosphorous” is reclaimed by the scientific term “suprasternal notch,” and Kip’s pronunciation while reading Kipling’s novel is corrected by the English patient in line with the abstract rules of standard English. Identitarian belonging, property ownership, and linguistics are thus

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represented as inextricably intertwined, defining and regulating everyone located in the previously uncharted space of the nationless desert. Like the incursions of identitarianism evident in Almásy’s containment of Katharine’s body into a map of the desert, instances of scarring and torture aim to impose fixed identities onto otherwise transgressive corporealities. The Canadian spy Caravaggio, with the code name Moose, is betrayed and mutilated by an Arab nurse hired by the Nazis.169 Caravaggio’s mutilated thumbs and the patient’s burned face embody not only the unobjectifiable experience of suffering through the visual close-up on parts of the body that are in pain, but also contain in themselves identitarian procedures of demarcation. As a result, Caravaggio has his spy past imprinted on his body and his thief past erased; unable to hold onto material objects anymore, the former thief holds on to the delusional promises of morphine addiction.170 The identitarian imperative is reiterated by the care paid to the actors’ accents: all the “international bastards” — played by Juliette Binoche (Hana), Ralph Fiennes (the English patient/Laszlo de Almásy), Willem Dafoe (David Caravaggio) and Naveen Andrews (Kip), as well as those actors playing German and Canadian soldiers, or the members of the International Sand Club — speak with a recognizably “foreign” accent.171 The agglomeration of non-standard accents (and characters) reinforces the otherness of the film’s soundscape in unison with its exotic landscape. Just as mapping and punctuation function as means of containment, regulation, and control, accents and soundtrack act as aural markers of difference. At the same time, however, one can discern an effort to hapticize the identitarian impulse of the written and spoken word, to make it more material and pliable. Bronwen Thomas claims that the film’s frequent references to written texts can be interpreted as Minghella’s equivalent to Ondaatje’s reliance on cinematic techniques in his writing.172 I argue that it can also be seen as Minghella’s adaptation of the self-reflective narration so typical of Ondaatje’s texts. Such quasi-metafictional moments slow down the pace of the film, freeing it from the constraints of realist and plot-driven representation; they also point at its constructed nature, implying the potency of the artistic reinvention of language and History. So if the patient’s reproach of Kip’s reading being “too fast” because his “eye is too impatient” and he has to “think about the speed of Kipling’s pen” 173 interpellates the colonial subject into assuming an unambiguous position of subjectification, the shift of emphasis from the eye to the body also enables a new power dynamic. Circumscribing optical control, the patient’s injunction shortens the distance between writer (Kipling) and reader (Kip), and foregrounds the building blocks (punctuation marks) of Kipling’s novel (and by extension colonial rhetoric). Revealing the constructedness of Kipling’s and the

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patient’s compromised ideological discourses, the scene unveils avenues for their undoing. After all, Kip’s throat refuses to “swallow” the words — an unequivocal embodied response to the sapper’s colonial subjugation and assumed inferiority. In a similar fashion, viewers are invited to explore the cinematic artifact unfolding on the screen as an assemblage of shifting tastes and hazy textures rather than predictable images and linear plot lines. During the first days of their stay in the monastery Hana feeds the patient with plums from her garden by chewing pieces in her mouth and passing them into his; the close-up of the patient’s face shows the tongue reaching for the plum and then a drop of its juice dribbling down his chin. This image of visual, tactile, and gustatory dimensions brings the point-of-view shot (in this particular scene it is Hana’s) to the surface of the patient’s body, thus transforming the purely optical into multisensory. Such instances of cinematic hapticization permeate both omniscient long shots and highly subjective point-of-view shots, undermining the illusion of objective narration as well as that of autonomous perspective. In the monastery, Hana’s contemplation of the patient or Kip is frequently obstructed by door and window frames or beams in the ceiling. Making omniscience impossible, this technique highlights the partial “framing” of Hana’s vision by the material objects surrounding her. The transformed quality of the optical eye resurfaces in Hana and Kip’s relationship. While for most of the film it is Hana who watches Kip’s movements, the scenes of Kip’s wooing Hana with the snail lights and the visit to the chapel reveal a balanced power dynamic.174 Guided by the flickering of the snail light from outside the patient’s room to the stables where Kip stays, Hana “finds” him not because she has hunted him down but because he wants to be found, a reversal of the sapper’s everyday activities (when he is the one that has to find bombs). Kip’s gift to her, then, is both the revelation that he can be approached by the small light of the snail shells, rather than blinding exposure, and the epiphany that the frescoes in the chapel can be seen from close quarters and approached as embodied shapes. The sapper hoists Hana to the ceiling and swings her from wall to wall, so that, illuminated by her flare, the faces of the frescoes come alive in her vicinity.175 Kip’s excitement and Hana’s sighs convey an erotic experience of seeing and touching: light has multiplied into miniature snail lights that have guided one person to another, light has also transformed into the flickering halo of a flare that is not used in destructive warfare but brings works of art into the fallible intimacy of human contact. The transience of Kip’s snail light and Hana’s glance at and graze of the frescoes lends their visual experience a sense of physicality and vulnerability, thus challenging the control of the imperial identitarian gaze. The soundscape of the film provides an alternative form of associative

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montage, linking together seemingly disparate images. Minghella has adapted some of the conversations, thus transforming them into an aural version of the dissolve; such is the recurrent exchange between Katharine and Almásy, “Shall we be all right?,”176 and the repeated conversation about paper wedding anniversaries between Caravaggio and the English patient, and Caravaggio and Geoffrey Clifton.177 At the same time, it also entails the subversion of existing power dynamics, for instance, when the voiceover of the English patient is taken over by Hana and Katharine reading Katharine’s entry in Almásy’s diary. The Hana/Katharine voiceover is the aural background not only for Katharine’s last minutes in the cave, but also for Almásy’s return to her three years after he leaves her in the Cave of Swimmers, as well as for the English patient’s suicide by a lethal morphine overdose, which takes place another two years later. Ondaatje’s patient identifies death as being “in the third person”;178 Minghella’s narrative signals this obliteration of the (male) self by removing completely the patient as a narrator. Instead, it is Hana and Katharine who assume control. In this way dialogues and voiceover are used not only to drive the plot forward; similarly to the film’s metafictional references, these elements contribute to the weaving of an aurality that complements the lack of visual demarcation and simultaneously with that questions dominant discourses.179 The soundtrack of the film acts as a supplementary, non-verbal aural background, which superimposes in a suggestive rather than literal way events and experiences of different temporal and spatial locations. Szerelem, Szerelem is the aural background of the hand drawing and the plane flying over the desert in the opening scene of the film; later on, the same tune — this time identified as a Hungarian song — is played after Katharine and Almásy meet as lovers just before Geoffrey finds out about their affair; and finally, in the concluding images, mixed with Gabriel Yared’s classical performance, the tune accompanies Almásy’s grieving for Katharine in the Cave of Swimmers. Both the Hungarian song and the period jazz pieces Wang Wang Blues and Cheek to Cheek function as indices of the historical setting of the film, the inter-war years. At the same time, however, the malleability of their usage in dissolves and cuts brings about the sense of liberating music from the constraints of realistic representation and national belonging. In line with Caravaggio’s claim that music should not be owned,180 the soundscape of Minghella’s film transcends temporal and geographical constraints. The mixing of sounds as disparate as classical music and Hungarian folk, hopscotch thumping and African drums beating, testifies to the filmic attempt at resisting demarcation in the aural field as well. The final shots build a cross-cutting sequence between Hana and Caravaggio’s departure from the monastery and Katharine and Almásy’s

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flight over the desert. Echoing the opening scene, the camera reverses its movement, starting with a medium shot from the side of the cockpit, and then cutting to an overhead long shot of the plane and an aerial shot of the desert. This receding camera eye is mirrored in Hana’s departure from the monastery, where the English patient has wished to die; her eyes pay a final look at the old building, hover for a moment over the faces of the children on the truck with her, and gaze absent-mindedly at the sun’s rays between the trees lining the side of the road. The alternating bars of light and dark are reminiscent of the latticed windows and door frames obstructing clear eyesight that proliferate in the film. Eventually the boundaries between areas of light and dark blur similarly to the striking way the desert dunes transform into human bodies. One is thus led to think that the final view we are given — from above the plane flying over the desert — merges Hana’s point of view with that of her dead patient. While trees and sunlight, desert and bodies, are superimposed on one another, the gazes of Hana and the English patient, just like the voices of Hana and Katharine, merge into one.

Epilogue

The Haptic in Literature: Hiding, Playing, Educating This is where I learnt that sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us. Just as there is, in the real landscape of Paris in Les Misérables, that small fictional street Victor Hugo provides for Jean Valjean to slip into, in which to hide from his pursuers. What was that fictional street’s name? I no longer remember. I come from Divisadero Street. Divisadero, from the Spanish word for “division,” the street that at one time was the dividing line between San Francisco and the fields of the Presidio. Or it might derive from the word divisar, meaning “to gaze at something from a distance.” (There is a “height” nearby called El Divisadero.) Thus a point from which you can look far into the distance.1

Having left behind a violent past and disintegrated family, Anna — the protagonist in Ondaatje’s latest novel Divisadero — moves from the United States to France to explore in situ the archives of Lucien Segura, a fictional early-twentieth-century writer. The novelistic gaze migrates with her: the opening panoramic view over the life of the unorthodox siblings Anna, Claire, and Coop on a farm in Northern California2 is shattered with the discovery of Anna and Coop’s love affair by her father and his violent assault on the teenage farm-hand; the narrative thereafter traces the disparate experiences of Coop as a cardsharp in the casinos of Nevada, Claire as a research assistant for the Public Defender’s Office in San Francisco, and Anna as Segura’s biographer in southern France. In a typically Ondaatjean fashion, Divisadero not only unfolds in different geographical settings, but also plunges back in time to explore the childhood of Anna’s French lover Rafael (mid-twentieth century) and the past of her research interest Segura (early twentieth century). It is in the concluding passages of the novel where the dispersed characters and narrative strands converge again, only to be dissolved with Segura’s suicide in a lake — floating away in a boat whose boards ominously start cracking “like the one crucial bone in the body that holds sanity, that protects the road out to the future.”3 Divisadero announces its preoccupation with the art of writing at the very outset — in the first-person epigraph, written by the researcher and writer “formerly known as Anna.”4 Willing to immerse herself in the world of the

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French novelist Colette and relax in the arms of an anonymous “you,” the narrator yearns to stumble upon the haven of art and hide from the absolute certainties of “truth” and “reality.”5 Anna finds in Segura’s last abode in Dému, and in his manuscripts and journals this longed for shelter from the disturbing memories of that violent afternoon on her father’s farm, as well as a secret escape alley into the French writer’s life: There are times when she needs to hide in a stranger’s landscape, so that she can look back at the tumult of her youth, to the still-undiminished violence of her bloodied naked self between her father and Coop, the moment of violence that deformed her, all of them. Anna, who keeps herself at a distance from those who show anger or violence, just as she is still fearful of true intimacy.6

Reminiscent of the tentative care administered by Patrick in In the Skin of a Lion, Hana and Kip in The English Patient, Sarath, Gamini, and Ananda in Anil’s Ghost, Anna is surrounded by moats of formality. Coveting the security of distance and the refuge of “a third-person voice,”7 the researcher is comfortable with her lover Rafael’s penchant to “dissolve,” and fascinated by the enigma surrounding his father Liébard/Astolphe and his gitan mother Aria. Epistemological and ontological self-effacement — such as her concealment behind the third person — secures Anna with the requisite narrative gaze that can reconstitute her splintered self to wholeness and recuperate her traumatic past to wholesomeness; physical or emotional intimacy — as her past experiences in California demonstrate — spells violence, fragmentation, and loss. At the same time, however, her research is far from being a pedantic and impartial scientific project. Moved by her father’s copy of Interviews with Californios: Women from Early Times to the Present — a collection of transcriptions recording the lives of women of historical humility, including that of her own mother Lydia Mendez — and the Bancroft Library archives of Lucien Segura — recordings of the writer reciting his poems in a voice imbued with “a sweet shadow and hesitance”8 — Anna looks for the small detail that will betray affinity with the objects of her scholarly investigations. Like the English patient, she fills in her notebooks with fragments and drawings, the marginalia of subtext rather than main plot and character. Sketching a vague portrait of Segura, Anna thus constructs a mask for herself behind which she can rewrite her tenuous relationship with her “rumour”9 of a mother, the “fearful love”10 of her father, the intense intimacy with Claire, and the dangerous desire for Coop. To the French writer Lucien Segura art is both a delicious act of witnessing moments of abandon and “a way he could enter the world as himself.”11

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Rather than merely an exit, as suggested by Anna, writing for Segura is an entrance, an exploration, a curiosity, “a place of emergency [. . .] a pigeonnier flown into from all the realms one had travelled through.”12 The metaphor of the pigeonnier is invoked by Anna’s lover Rafael too, who sees the space just under the roof of a house as a creative point of departure for a journey of numerous small revelations: “What you experience in high air is the petite life on earth, a drifting of voices, the creak of a wagon, the retort and smoke from a gun among the almond trees.”13 It is this “petite life” observed from afar and in flight — from a distant yet unstable vantage point — that captures the “essential notes”14 of existence, stripped of unnecessary trimmings and contraptions. Writing as a pigeonnier, as well as a flight from a pigeonnier, is therefore, not simply another metaphor for artistic solipsism and imaginative control. While advocating immersion into “the life of the imagination,” Segura and Rafael aim to accommodate both the withdrawal from the world and the retrieval of intimacy with it: “a terrible proposal of secrecy — what you might do with a life, with all those hours of being separated from it — that could lead somehow to intimacy.”15 The title of Ondaatje’s novel — as spelt out by Anna in the epigraph to this chapter — recapitulates this dialectics of art between distance and proximity. The divergent etymologies of the word divisadero — related to the verbs “to divide” and “to gaze at from a distance” — mark the novelistic endeavor as an optical exercise of omniscience and differentiation: gazing from afar and deliberating on the boundary separating San Francisco from Presidio, such a narrative look relies on distance in order to discern difference, exercise control, and make cohere. This initial optical thrust, however, is made indecisive by Anna’s uncertain hold over her memories and her (as well as Segura’s and Rafael’s) quest for that fragile swivel where “art meets life in secret.”16 The semantics of the word divisadero lose their pre-eminence to the indexicality of the word’s simultaneous extension into reality and fiction; leaving the domain of signification, divisadero becomes embodied in a San Francisco street, which flows seamlessly into a fictional street in Les Misérables. The artistic gaze is no longer detached in its authority to forge meanings, but is equally vulnerable to fictionalization: Anna’s past seeps into the pages of a novel just as creatures and objects from Segura’s writing resurface in his house in Dému.17 This pattern is reflected on the formal level as well, where the multiple narratives of Divisadero self-consciously echo the recurrent structure of a villanelle, revisiting “familiar moments of emotion.”18 Refusing to impose a linear timeline or single out a prominent event, the novel’s narrative voices hover over “something very small, something that might occur within just a square inch or two of a Brueghel”19 and trace its rippling effects in the lives and stories of others. The artistic drive, therefore, is not towards

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recuperating into a whole what has hitherto been fragmented or lost, but towards seeking tentative intimacy. Such proximity challenges the mimetic premises of representation, the boundaries between reality and fiction, and the causal patterning of narrative time, at the same time as it engenders a renewed appreciation of vulnerability as an ethical approach to others. This ethically driven mode of artistic perception, which questions the steadfast distinction between the historical and the fictional, the detached and the intimate, the rational and the affectionate, constitutes the haptic quality of Ondaatje’s writing I have been discussing in this book. Offering “a folded map that places you beside another geography,”20 the multisensory investment of a haptic text blurs ontological boundaries and questions epistemological givens in order to open the gates of creativity for readers and writers alike. Challenging narrative omniscience, a haptic text constructs a “mid-air” writer of “the lost-roof technique”;21 a thief of character, who, similarly to Caravaggio in In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient (and his counterpart in Divisadero, the elusive figure of Rafael’s father Liébard/ Astolphe),22 becomes landscape, reconnoiters his “victims” through the marginalia of their physical surroundings, and disappears in mid-air/mid-water by the end.23 Tempting the reader to partake of the creative act, the haptic text performs a seductive game of poker: like Cooper’s double-duke play in Divisadero, the “crimps” placed in the riffle-stacked deck that the text has become, enable the reader to follow different trajectories and end up with a variety of winning hands. Collective and participatory, such art enables the reader to “cut” at several points of the text and carry out their own riffle-stacking; they need to play their hands by hand. As Lucien Segura reminisces, “The skill of writing offers little to the viewer. There is only this five-centimetre relationship between your eyes and the pen.”24 It is not a matter of analytical observation, nor is it a confession of one’s skill: “I love the performance of a craft [. . .] yet I walk away when discussions of it begin.”25 Haptic art thrives in the marginalia, footnotes, and askew glances, and does not offer a sensually rich reproduction of reality. Rather, confronting the reader with the close-up of a blurry image, the haptic demands their bodily engagement and affective response; it does not merely reflect but constitutes a reality which is defined by the permeability of subject-object boundaries and an ethics of relationality. As my analysis of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems, Coming through Slaughter, and Running in the Family, as well as of the documentaries Sons of Captain Poetry and The Clinton Special, has shown, the process of hapticization in Ondaatje’s oeuvre is primarily enacted through the mixed-media quality of these works and their emphasis on multisensory experience.26 The haptic medley of the verbal, the visual,

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the aural, and the tactile is conveyed at the level of form not only through the inclusion of photographs, sonographs, and drawings, but also through verbal translations of visual and auditory representations, typographical and editing choices, rhythmic patterns, and narrative structure. Making the optical gaze of the omniscient narrator intimate and caressing entails the birth of an agentive reader, who can take part in the “directing” of the text. While the dissolution of monologic textual opticity gives way to heteroglossic textural propinquity, Ondaatje’s works do not simply celebrate multivalent meaning, but recurrently remind one of the disruptive potential of the haptic. For not only are these narratives postmodernist flights into imagination and experiment, but they are also enactments of inevitably disturbing interventions into History. The constant focus on materiality and physicality does not merely resuscitate into transcendence the corporeal denigrated by metaphysical discourses; rather, zooming in onto cuts and gushes, wounds and ailing bodies, these texts build an unsettling image of the violent nature of historical excision and sanitized representation. To Anna, the self-exiled narrator of Divisadero, the exhumation of “unknown corners”27 of History she performs exposes the discursive violence of absencing which many a story has undergone — from her mother’s dictation in Interviews with Californios and Segura’s journals during his seclusion in the Gers region to the lives and work of Dumas’s plot researcher August Maquet and Colette’s instructor Georges Wague. Mirrored in acts of physical violence — personal (against Coop and herself by her father, against Segura by a rabid dog, against Roman and Marie-Neige by the villagers) as well as public (the Great War and the Gulf War) — the silencing of these voices is lent painful tangibility. At the same time, Anna’s research does not merely explicate the missing stories; on the contrary, she is careful to preserve some of their opacity. Describing her research process as analogous to “twinship”28 — whereby one of the twins absorbs the other while retaining a trace of the latter’s existence — Anna is aware of the risk of sensational exposure that her rewriting runs by inserting people and stories back into official History. A compilation of fact and fiction, of multiple viewpoints and voices, Anna’s research is akin to her own splintered being (she is “formerly known as Anna,” “this person who is barely Anna”).29 What draws her to historically faded subjects is their “sense that history was around them, not within them,”30 and her awareness that “[t]here is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly.”31 A purely optical gaze — external, distant, and uniform — cannot adhere to the relational ontology Anna espouses: the permeability of the self, its responsiveness to others, and responsibility for preserving the irreducibility of their difference. Aware of the

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historical and artistic plunder that might sensationalize or obliterate people and events, Anna acknowledges that “in the delicate path of life, they have been turned into the Jack of Hearts or the Five of Clubs.”32 Therefore, she cannot but be adjacent to such histories and responsive to others’ opacity — whenever the phone rings Anna will wait for Coop’s voice or Claire’s breath “to announce” themselves,33 just as she is willing to place herself in the arms of the “you,” her reader-lover Rafael. Her humility to the scraps of the life of others does not claim complete knowledge and she is conscious of her artistic insufficiencies; Anna’s epistemology therefore is that of adjacency — it “makes [one] more involved”34 and ultimately more responsible, “cautious of what [one] take[s] in and nurture[s].”35 Haptic aesthetics, in this sense, is capable of offering an ethically responsible narrative that disrupts normative regimes of representation without dismissing the personal and the intimate. The indexical nature of hapticity constructs the text as a trace of a material reality and real material bodies; a remainder that is itself physical (conveyed both through mixed-media approach and through thematic emphasis on corporeality) and opaque. Thus, the inscrutable corporealities and untranslatable textualities in Running in the Family, In the Skin of a Lion, and Anil’s Ghost can constitute a form of witness writing, which does not become a redemptive spectacle, nor does it offer a cure-all solution. Resisting transparent representation, absolute cognition, and the pathos of emotional catharsis, these works bear an unsettling witness to the irreducibility of difference and self-reflectively acknowledge their own representational limits. Similarly to the physicality of the body, Ondaatje’s haptic writing testifies to its own fallibility and insufficiency, and invites the reader in their turn to become an embodied and participatory, an agentive and vulnerable witness. The affective and ethical shortfalls of the optical gaze of the artist are revealed most notably in the love relationship between Lucien Segura and Marie-Neige in Divisadero. Devoid of the stability of a conventional family structure, the young Segura — not unlike Anna’s disappearance into books — uses the “drug of stories”36 as a shield against the world. External reality, however, erupts into the youngster’s life when a rabid dog attacks him and as a result Segura loses the sight in his left eye. The incident radically transforms the power dynamic between the young man and Marie-Neige, the wife-servant of his neighbor Roman, whom he has undertaken to teach to read. From her teacher Segura is reduced to the status of a student; rather than being the one introducing Marie-Neige to the world of the imagination, the almost illiterate woman becomes his tentative and faulty guide. The loss of sight awakes in the future writer an acute feeling of humiliation and indignation: “He refused to step out to meet her words [. . .]. The reversal

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of roles was embarrassing, galling”;37 nonetheless, it is exactly the loss of optical clarity that results in Segura’s acquisition of a stereoscopic vision. In addition to the passive wife-servant, his newfound vulnerability enables him to see in Marie-Neige the bold lover who gives him a billet-doux on his wedding day, the confident reader who aptly analyses Dumas’s musketeers, the proud woman prepared to earn her sustenance by working a farm on her own.38 While the ironic loss of security of someone called “Segura” does not escape the finely tuned poetic mind, it takes the writer years to appreciate the enabling potential of his loss of sight. For Segura’s inability to reconcile these contrasting images of his beloved into one is fundamental to his prolific imaginary renditions of Marie-Neige. During his diphtheria episode in the Great War, the writer opens the gate to his past and relives moments with her “as if he had been handed a mirror for the first time and could see what he held only faintly in memory.”39 Weakened by the disease, his mind has retained only the essential notes of his affection, and its hallucinatory workings ensure Segura’s passage “from a life lived to a life imagined.”40 Upon his return from the front, demoralized by the inadequate certainties of the political world and cynical about the proven impotence of language — “honest literary empathy did not exist in him anymore”41 — the writer immerses himself in Marie-Neige’s surroundings on the Marseillan farm in order to dream their good-byes into existence.42 Segura rekindles the intensity of his “map of yearnings”43 in the adventure stories he publishes about Roman, Marie-Neige, and “One-Eyed Jacques” under the pseudonym of “La Garonne”44 — a map that conveys the truthfulness of their intimacy within a highly fictional context, a map that blurs the contours of his self until Marie-Neige is fully “within him.”45 Having completed this “twinship” process of being permeated by otherness, Segura leaves Marseillan for Dému where he becomes the adoptive father of the boy Rafael and years later of the researcher Anna. On the final pages of the novel Segura’s voice mingles with Anna’s narrative; the “twinship” process of engendering vulnerability and preserving opacity is thus replicated across historical, geographic, and ontological boundaries.46 If illegible and uncontrollable affects — desire, fury, obsession, jealousy, loss, and hatred — have acted as a trigger for the multiple plots of Divisadero, their intersubjective transfer is captured by the haptic permeability of selves and histories — an unsettling and unresolved intimacy that invites the critical re-evaluation of the ethical relation to otherness.47 By forging an interpretive praxis, informed by haptic synesthesia and indexicality as a viable aesthetico-political approach that sustains creativity and disturbs hegemony, this book has traced encounters that most content/ form readings and ideology critiques of Ondaatje’s works have so far failed to explore in detail. While critics such as Neluka Silva, Will Garrett-Petts,

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and Gail Jones48 among others have traced the political and ethical ramifications of Ondaatje’s aesthetic choices, their projects either have focused on individual works or have lapsed into somewhat rigid binarisms. In more general terms, I have suggested a reassessment of the relationship between art, reality, and ideology, the political, and the aesthetic. While the invocation of creative ambiguity between ontological and epistemological domains smacks of postmodernist non-committal playfulness, the investment in the tactile as indexical of physical vulnerability brings to the fore not only the opacity of difference but also the situatedness in concrete socio-economic frameworks. Calling for a reconsideration of what it means to write politically, this book has focused on the potential of micropolitical acts of creation that are informed by embodiment and materiality, irreducibility of difference and multiple allegiances. It is this insistence on recognizing the positive aspects of opacity and the impossibility of seamless alignment to a uniform macropolitical formation that engenders the necessity for partial witnessing — proximal and imperfect, aware of its own insufficiency, constructed nature, and implication in ideological paradigms. And it is in the recognition of such vulnerability and complicity that non-appropriative and inclusive micropolitics of reinvention can take place: a reinvention that lends agency but one that also stubbornly bears the imprint of identitarian inscriptions and macropolitical excisions. In 2005 House of Anansi Press published Ondaatje’s poem “The Story” from his 1998 poetry collection Handwriting. This new and limited edition of an already familiar poem is accompanied by the colored illustrations of David Bolduc — printed on the right-hand side — and each typed line of the poem — printed on the left-hand side — is followed by the rendition of the same line in Ondaatje’s own handwriting in scarlet ink.49 Looking for the buried “maps” and “winding paths” of memory50 in the first 40 days of a child’s life, the poem is attentive to the clouded clarity of the self as a way of reconstructing “the buildings of the past.”51 Recounting different acts of telling — a king sharing his plans about the recapture of a city with his pregnant wife, a father lamenting death to his yet unborn son, a prince sharing his father’s lessons with his warriors — “The Story” slips between ontological realities and diegetic levels. The king’s account reaches his unborn child, whereas the wisp of hair he gently bites off his wife’s head later materializes in the ropes his son, the subversive prince, attempts to use in order to avoid capture. This resistance to fixity and boundedness is reflected in the Anansi Press edition of “The Story”: unpaginated, the poem flows across several pages to which Bolduc’s drawings — blurred, with soft focus and limited source of lighting — add further narrative strands. Even if framed by endpapers illustrated with fragments of ropes — alluding to the fugitives’

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ropes, which end up being “not long enough to reach the ground,”52 and which the warriors extend by cutting and braiding in their own hair — the new edition of “The Story” resists containment. Its continued life beyond the original collection Handwriting and inclusion in the global projects of World Literacy Canada53 imply that art as a series of “small lessons”54 conducted in “faint light”55 and in an “uncaught way”56 can reach out across borders, walls, and differences, and bring about significant political, as well as intimate transformations. The rope, rather than a symbol of bondage, rule, and subjugation, stands for the exquisite craftsmanship of the artful “rope-makers” who assist the king and his son, the prince, in their campaign. Sinuous and graceful, with multiple strands entwined in an intimate embrace, ropes secure, connect, and transform. Their shortness, therefore, is not a sign of lack or weakness: rather, just like the “dismantled”57 monumentality of memory, the gap between the end of the lithe rope and solid ground will allow for creative interventions. The warriors’ hair braided in with the ropes might just about help them succeed in their plot; but what matters more is that this ingenious braiding intensifies in characters and readers alike the memory of the king’s intimacy with his wife. The macropolitical context of warfare is thus superimposed onto the private, and what remains with the reader is the memory of “a tender story”:58 the tactile intimacy between father and son, the gustatory recollection of the king’s conjugal love. If in the crucial moment of the battle the young prince remembers the unremembered father’s lesson, the absence of denouement — the sudden pause signaled by an ellipsis and a typographical marker — gestures at the potential involvement (“braiding in”) of the reader. In this sense, Bolduc’s illustrations of the ropes — reminiscent as they are of prison bars — do not end with the covers of the Anansi Press edition of “The Story”: the vertical bars become horizontal lines of poetry and threaded in among them is Ondaatje’s bright colored handwriting. “[A]s deliberately obfuscatory as a piece of string,”59 these handwritten lines stubbornly insist on their enigmatic opacity while deftly engineering the reader’s playful intrusion; inevitably compromised by their author’s fetishized fame, the sensually appealing scarlet letters can awaken the responsive and responsible reader in each of us.

Notes

Introduction 1 Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador, 2001): pp. 285–6. 2 For a detailed analysis of the ocularcentrism of Western philosophical thought, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1994); Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); and David Michael Levin, The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation (London and New York: Routledge, 1988). Peter Sloterdijk’s succinct comment about the preponderance of the visual paradigm over thinking is telling in this sense: “The eyes are the organic prototype of philosophy. Their enigma is that they not only can see but are also able to see themselves seeing. [. . .] A good part of philosophical thinking is actually only eye reflex, eye dialectic, seeing-oneself-see” (Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred, foreword Andreas Huyssen (London: Verso, 1988): p. 145.) 3 For a more detailed analysis of the overlaps between the capacity to visualize and the ability to verbalize, see Robert Rivlin and Karen Gravelle, Deciphering the Senses: The Expanding World of Human Perception (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985). 4 In the course of this discussion, I will be using the “somatic” and the “tactile” to refer not only to cutaneous sensations (of the skin) but also to visceral (sensations of the internal organs), proprioceptive (the sense of muscles maintaining the body’s position), vestibular (the sense of the muscles maintaining the body’s balance), and kinesthetic (the sense of movement) experiences. 5 For a comprehensive analysis of materialist practices of reading, see Karin Littau, Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006). Will Garrett-Petts’s article on the necessity to return to an all-sensory response to literature is also relevant in this respect; see Will F. Garrett-Petts, “Garry Disher, Michael Ondaatje, and the Haptic Eye: Taking a Second Look at Print Literacy,” Children’s Literature in Education 31 (1) (2000): 39–52. 6 The word “haptic” is etymologically related to the Greek word ἅπτοµαι (haptomai) meaning “to grasp, to seize.” Initially, the term was applied primarily to the

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8 9 10

11

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aesthetic domain, fleshing out the links between perception and the appreciation of beauty; more recently haptic has been used with reference to tactility in digital and communication technologies (interface, virtual reality, force feedback, telerobotics), health sciences and medicine (prosthetics, simulation, therapy). I have borrowed the term “micropolitical” from the collaborative works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, On the Line, trans. John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and foreword Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988); and Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: University of Columbia Press, 1990): pp. 135–55). Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Michael Ondaatje, Coming through Slaughter (London, Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador, 1984): p. 144. Aristotle’s use of the word αἴσθησις (aisthesis) to describe a sensory faculty that involves all the senses (Aristotle, De Anima, trans. R. D. Hicks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986): pp. II.5–III.3) gives a very different idea of aesthetics compared with the idealist and rationalist versions of Kant and Hegel. See also Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone Books, 2007): pp. 21–7. For an overview of “the sensual revolution,” see David Howes, ed., Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005); Michael Syrotinski and Ian Maclachlan, eds., Sensual Reading: New Approaches to Reading in Its Relations to the Senses (London: Associated University Press, 2001). For a critique of the “turn to affect” in the humanities, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003). David Howes, “Introduction: Empire of the Senses,” in Empire of the Senses, pp. 1–17 (p. 4). On different cultural constructions of the senses, see Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard, “Biology’s Gift: Interrogating the Turn to Affect,” Body & Society 16 (1) (2010): 29–56; Clare Hemmings, “Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn,” Cultural Studies 19 (5) (2005): 548–67; and Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (London: Sage, 2003). Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London and New York: Continuum, 2008). On the significance of reinstating perception in scholarly research, see Paul Stoller, Sensuous Scholarship (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); and David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003). Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987): p. 165. Aristotle himself acknowledged the inherent multiplicity and dispersal of touch: For if touch is not a single sense but many, then it is necessary that the things that are tangible are the objects of the many senses. But whether sense is many or one is a problem, as is the question of what the

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Notes sense-organ of the touch faculty is [. . .]. For every sense is believed to be of a single opposition, as sight is of the black and white, hearing of the sharp and flat, and taste of the bitter and sweet. But in that which is tangible there are many oppositions, hot and cold, dry and wet, rough and smooth and all of the others that are of this kind. (Aristotle, De Anima, II.11 (422b)

17 Compare, for instance, Merleau-Ponty’s account of tactile reciprocity as enabling an empathic and embodied agency; “When I press my two hands together, it is not a matter of two sensations felt together as one perceives two objects placed side by side, but of an ambiguous arrangement in which the two hands can alternate in the role of ‘touching’ and ‘touched’” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 2002): p. 106), with Derrida’s analysis of the debilitating experience of reciprocal seeing: when the seeing eye sees it is being seen (for instance in a mirror), it sees its own blindness (“Seeing the seeing and not the visible, it sees nothing. The seeing eye sees itself blind” (Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993): p. 57). 18 For an overview and analysis of philosophical thought on touch and the body, see Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994); and Mark Paterson, The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects, Technologies (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007). 19 The issue of sensorial correspondence and independence was first raised by René Descartes in La Dioptrique (Leiden, 1637), and subsequently discussed by John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1690); Denis Diderot’s Lettre sur les aveugles (London, 1749); and George Berkeley’s, Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (Dublin, 1709). 20 Patterson, The Senses of Touch, pp. 37–57. 21 Howes, “Introduction: Empire of the Senses,” p. 9. 22 Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (London and New York: Routledge, 1999): p. 3. 23 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, ed. Claude Lefort (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968): pp. 123–35; Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993): pp. 152–95. 24 Iris Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990): p. 182. 25 Aloïs Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans., foreword, and annotations Rolf Winkes (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider Editore, 1985). See also Levin’s discussion of the “assertoric” and “aletheic” gaze (Levin, The Opening of Vision, p. 440). 26 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn, introduction Hannah Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999): pp. 211–44; and Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, pp. 83–107.

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27 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 382. 28 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Walter Ong, likewise, sees in the technological extensions of man the possibility for a return to a more communal and participatory culture (Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologies of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 1991)). 29 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, preface Steven Holl (Chichester: Wiley Academy, 2005): p. 39. 30 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999): pp. 162–3 and 184. 31 Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990): p. 118. 32 Marks, The Skin of the Film, pp. 162–63 and 184–85. 33 Alexis Tadié, “From the Ear to the Eye: Perceptions of Language in the Fictions of Laurence Sterne,” in Sensual Reading, pp. 106–23 (p.115). 34 Gabriel Josipovici, Writing and the Body (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1982): p. 12. 35 The all too obvious presence of the body, parts of the body or bodily encounters in the titles of all these works is also telling. 36 Since the 1970s Ondaatje has written/contributed to a number of screenplays, including for his own novel Coming through Slaughter (never produced), Robert Kroetsch’s The William Dawe Badlands Expedition 1916 (1983), the CFC production Love Clinic (1990), Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of The English Patient (1996), Bruce McDonald’s short Elimination Dance (1998) and Veronica Tenant’s dance shorts Shadow Pleasures (2004). See also Michael Ondaatje, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (London: Bloomsbury, 2003). 37 Bart Testa, “He Did Not Work Here for Long: Michael Ondaatje in the Cinema,” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (1994): 154–66; Derek Finkle, “From Page to Screen: Michael Ondaatje as Filmmaker,” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (1994): 167–85; and Steven Heighton, “Approaching ‘That Perfect Edge’: Kinetic Techniques in the Poetry and Fiction of Michael Ondaatje,” Studies in Canadian Literature 13 (2) (1988), accessed 16 July 2004, http://www.lib.unb. ca 38 Gilles Deleuze, “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” in Negotiations, pp. 3–12 (pp. 7–8). 39 Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, Photogenic Painting: Gérard Fromanger, intro. Adrian Rifkin (London: Blackdog, 1999): pp. 76–77. Elsewhere in the book, Deleuze elaborates: What is revolutionary in this painting? Perhaps it is the radical absence of bitterness, of the tragic, of anxiety, of all this drivel you get in the fake great artists who are called witness to their age. All these fascistic and sadistic fantasies which lead to a painter being called an acute critic of the modern world, while all he does is play on his own resentments and complaisance, and on those of his buyers. (Ibid., pp. 74–75) 40 On the mutual dependence and constitution of the cognitive, the emotional and the somatic, see Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness (London: Heinemann, 1999);

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42 43 44 45 46 47

48

49

50 51

Notes Joseph E. LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1996); Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch, Evan Thompson, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); V. S. Ramchandran, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York: William Morrow, 1998). William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Dover Publications, 1957). For an overview of cognitive, psychological, and behaviorist thought on affect, see Paul Redding, The Logic of Affect (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1999): pp. 8–24; Kenneth T. Strongman, The Psychology of Emotion: From Everyday Life to Theory, 5th edn. (Chichester: J. Wiley & Sons, 2003); William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Silvan Tomkins, Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan Tomkins, ed. E. Virginia Demos (New York and Paris: Cambridge University Press, 1995). On the distinction between “drives” and “affects” see Tomkins, Exploring Affect, pp. 51–63; and Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, pp. 18–22. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 19. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004): pp. 6–9. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002): p. 35. John Protevi, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009): pp. 16–17. On the intersubjectivity of affect, see Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985); and Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2004). On the mobility of affect, see Brian Massumi, who discusses affect in a Bergsonian manner as an intensity, processual and uncontainable, enacting the body’s central feature to move and to be moved (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, pp. 23–45). On the other hand, Sara Ahmed argues that “the sociality of emotions” does not presuppose an individual or collective ownership of emotions that can be shared unproblematically; rather, what circulates among subjectivities is the objects to which one responds and saturates with affect (Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 10). Another school of thought has considered affect as central to somatic autopoiesis — the regulation of the self that can ensure and prolong its autonomy — and this view sits uncomfortably with recent cultural theorists’ thrust in the affective as conducive to the conceptualization (though not necessarily the implementation) of a new creative and emancipatory embodied politics (see Francisco Varela, Principles of Biological Autonomy (New York: Elsevier/North-Holland, 1979)). Patricia Ticineto Clough, “Afterword: The Future of Affect Studies,” Body & Society 16 (1) (2010): 222–30 (227). Lisa Blackman, “Embodying Affect: Voice-hearing, Telepathy, Suggestion and Modelling the Non-Conscious,” Body & Society 16 (1) (2010): 163–92 (166).

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52 Julian Henriques, “The Vibrations of Affect and Their Propagation on a Night Out on Kingston’s Dancehall Scene,” Body & Society 16 (1) (2010): 57–89 (76). 53 It is important to point out that theorists of affect are careful to distinguish between affect as a desubjectified pre-cognitive intensity, and emotion (or feeling) as a somatic-psychic experience that has been integrated into consciousness (through memory and history), named, and interpreted (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 28; Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, p. 6). 54 Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005): p. 5. 55 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 22. 56 Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (London: Harvard University Press, 1990): p. 22. 57 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); and Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1998). See also Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996). 58 Bennett, Empathic Vision, p. 10. 59 Ibid., p. 26. 60 Marianne Hirsch, “Marked by Memory: Feminist Reflections on Trauma and Transmission,” in Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community, ed. Nancy Miller and Jason Tougaw (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002): pp. 71–91. 61 Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. and intro. Cathy Caruth (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995): pp. 13–60; and Cathy Caruth, “Recapturing the Past,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, pp. 151–7. 62 Hirsch, “Marked by Memory,” p. 88. 63 Ibid., p. 88. In this aspect, Hirsch echoes Benjamin’s quest for a return to auratic distance. 64 Marks, The Skin of the Film, p. 191. 65 Ibid., p. 192. 66 In an interview with Linda Hutcheon about Running in the Family, Ondaatje says: That is certainly what I’m drawn to, especially the unspoken and unwritten stories — the “un-historical” stories. That’s one of the areas I think writers should write about. The media have created a kind of false surface of content in which they loll around, and they have to be reminded of the other side. (Linda Hutcheon, “Michael Ondaatje: Interview by Linda Hutcheon,” in Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions, ed. Linda Hutcheon and Marion Richmond (Toronto, ON: Oxford University Press, 1990): pp. 196–202 (pp. 198–9)) 67 On different forms of witnessing, see Dori Laub, “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, pp. 61–75. 68 Here I invoke Dori Laub’s concept of “being a witness to the process of witnessing;” see Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). Laub’s psychoanalytically driven understanding of testimony, similarly

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76 77

78 79 80

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Notes to that of Caruth’s and Felman’s, is premised on an epistemological crisis triggered off by a traumatic event, in his particular case, the Holocaust. My use of the term witnessing does not exclusively bind testimony to the reintegration of a traumatic experience into narrative memory, especially in view of the haptic contestation of the unitary subject. Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (London, Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador, 1984): p. 53. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., p. 198. Ibid., p. 79. For an examination of the role of the haptic in political agency, see Jennifer Fisher, “Relational Sense: Towards a Haptic Aesthetics,” Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine 87 (1997): 4–11. Some of these discussions include but are not limited to Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky, foreword Krystyna Pomorska, prologue Michael Holquist (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991); Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason; Margrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (London: Sage, 2002); and Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality (New York: Routledge, 2000). Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, pp. 74–96; Nigel Thrift, “Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect,” Geografska Annaler 86 (1) (2004): 57–78; and Protevi, Political Affect, pp. 18–23. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 42. In addition to Massumi, Brennan, and Protevi, other scholars whose work engages with the significance of affect in power structures and political discourse are William E. Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002); and Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Claude Gandelman, Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991): pp. 76–129. Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Washington: Pantheon Books, 1960). Papoulias and Callard, “Biology’s Gift,” p. 47. For a critique of the political potential of affect, see Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture and Victorian Sensationalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. and introduction Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: The Athlone Press, 1997); and Jean-François Lyotard, “Anima Minima,” in Postmodern Fables, trans. Georges van den Abbeele (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997): pp. 235–50. See also Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (1992): 3–41.

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82 David Howes, “HYPERESTHESIA, or, The Sensual Logic of Late Capitalism,” in Empire of the Senses, pp. 281–303 (p. 290); see also Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). Likewise, Brian Massumi insists that contemporary culture industries rely on “the primacy of affect in image reception” (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 24). 83 Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 13. 84 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989): p. 33. 85 Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd edn. (London and New York: Verso, 2002): p. 251. 86 See for instance Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 87 Gilles Deleuze, “Control and Becoming,” conversation with Toni Negri (1990), in Negotiations, pp. 169–76 (pp. 173–4). 88 Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line, p. 113. 89 Nicholas Thoburn, Deleuze, Marx and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2003): pp. 6–8. 90 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies” (1990), in Negotiations pp. 177–82; on Deleuze’s “miniaturization” of politics as response to the historical events in his day, see Isabelle Garo, “Molecular Revolutions: The Paradox of Politics in the Work of Gilles Deleuze,” in Deleuze and Politics, ed. Ian Buchanan and Nicholas Thoburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008): pp. 54–73. 91 Thoburn, Deleuze, Marx and Politics, p. 8. 92 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 93 Some of the more recent critiques of Deleuzean theories of identity and politics include Alain Badiou, The Clamour of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); and Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). For a general overview of Deleuzean politics, see Simone Bignall and Paul Patton, eds., Deleuze and the Postcolonial (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Ian Buchanan and Nicholas Thoburn, eds., Deleuze and Politics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008); and Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political: Thinking the Political (London: Routledge, 2000). 94 Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996): p. 24. 95 Kaplan further says: Becoming minor, a utopian process of letting go of privileged identities and practices, requires emulating the ways and modes of modernity’s “others.” Yet, like all imperialist discourses, these spaces and identities are produced through their imagining: that is, the production of sites of escape or decolonization for the colonizer signals a kind of theoretical tourism. [. . .] These imagined spaces are invested with subversive or destabilizing power by the “visitors,” as it were. (Ibid., p. 88)

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Notes Julie Wuthnow, in “Deleuze in the Postcolonial: On Nomads and Indigenous Politics,” Feminist Theory 3 (2) (2002): 183–200, takes to task Deleuze’s theory as disabling effective indigenous politics for its lack of location and for its reproduction of a universal western subject. Christopher Miller, “The Postidentitarian Predicament in the Footnotes of A Thousand Plateaus: Nomadology, Anthropology, and Authority,” Diacritics 23 (3) (1993): 6–35. Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamour of Being; and Slavoj Žižek, “The Ongoing ‘Soft Revolution’,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2) (2004): 292–323. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001): p. 150; see also Kaplan, Questions of Travel, p. 89; Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London and New York: Verso, 1992): p. 38; Deleuze, Postscript on Control Societies, p. 181; and Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (London, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1999): p. 27. Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 155–56; Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line, pp. 109–10. For an early postcolonial critique of identitarian thought, see Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, preface Jean-Paul Sartre (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965): p. 49. For a detailed analysis of the usefulness of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of identity in contemporary ethnic, cultural, and minority EU practices, see Janell Watson, “Theorising European Ethnic Politics with Deleuze and Guattari,” in Deleuze and Politics, pp. 196–217. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997): p. 18. Ibid., p. 20. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994): p. 4. Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic, p. 36. Douglas Barbour, Michael Ondaatje (New York: Twayne Publishers, Toronto, ON: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1993). See also Susan Spearey, “Cultural Crossings: The Shifting Subjectivities and Stylistics of Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and In the Skin of a Lion,” British Journal of Canadian Studies 11 (1) (1996): 133–41; and Elizabeth Kella, Beloved Communities: Solidarity and Difference in Fiction by Michael Ondaatje, Toni Morrison and Joy Kogawa (Uppsala: Studia Anglicistica Upsaliensia, 2000). Nell Waldman, Michael Ondaatje and His Works (Toronto, ON: ECW Press, 1992); and Sam Solecki, Ragas of Longing: The Poetry of Michael Ondaatje (Toronto, ON and London: University of Toronto Press, 2003). Linda Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (Toronto, ON and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988): p. 63. On the political implications of Ondaatje’s generic transgressions, see Robert Kroetsch, Essays, ed. Frank Davey and bpNichol (Toronto, ON: Open Letter, 1983); Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2002); and Ian Rae, From Cohen to Carson: The Poet’s Novel in Canada (Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008). Wil Verhoeven, “Playing Hide and Seek in Language: Michael Ondaatje’s Historiography of the Self,” American Review of Canadian Studies 24 (1) (1994): 21–38; Winfried Siemerling, Discoveries of the Other: Alterity in

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the Work of Leonard Cohen, Hubert Aquin, Michael Ondaatje and Nicole Brossard (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1994); Joanne Saul, Writing the Roaming Subject: The Biotext in Canadian Literature (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2006); and Annick Hillger, Not Needing All the Words: Michael Ondaatje’s Literature of Silence (Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006). Minoli Salgado, Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance, and the Politics of Place (New York: Routledge, 2007); Marilyn Adler Papayanis, Writing in the Margins: The Ethics of Expatriation from Lawrence to Ondaatje (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005); Katherine Stanton, Cosmopolitan Fictions: Ethics, Politics and Global Change in the Works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Jamaica Kincaid and J. M. Coetzee (London and New York: Routledge, 2005); and Yumma Siddiqi, Anxieties of Empire and the Fiction of Intrigue (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Leslie Mundwiler, Michael Ondaatje: Work, Image, Imagination (Vancouver, BC: Talonbooks, 1984); Christian Bök, “Destructive Creation: The Politicization of Violence in the Works of Michael Ondaatje,” Canadian Literature 132 (1992): 109–24; Julie Beddoes, “Which Side Is It On? Form, Class, and Politics in In the Skin of a Lion,” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (1994): 204–15; Mita Banerjee, The Chutneyfication of History: Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Bharati Mukherjee and the Postcolonial Debate (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2002). Frank Davey, Post-National Arguments: The Politics of the Anglophone-Canadian Novel since 1967 (Toronto, ON and London: University of Toronto Press, 1993). For further critique of Ondaatje’s representation of collective action, see Christian Bök, “The Secular Opiate: Marxism as an Ersatz Religion in Three Canadian Texts,” Canadian Literature 147 (1995): 11–22. Arun Mukherjee, Towards an Aesthetic of Opposition: Essays on Literature, Criticism and Cultural Imperialism (Stratford, ON: Williams-Wallace Publications, 1988); and Chelva Kanaganayakam, “A Trick with a Glass: Michael Ondaatje’s South Asian Connection,” Canadian Literature 132 (2) (1992): 33–42. Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion (London, Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador, 1988): p. 130.

Chapter 1 1 Marks, The Skin of the Film, p. 191. 2 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 1989); and Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 1992). 3 Marks, The Skin of the Film, p. 190. 4 See Gandelman, Reading Pictures; Gombrich, Art and Illusion; Jay, Downcast Eyes; and W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 5 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

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6 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, pp. 97–8. 7 Marks, The Skin of the Film, p. 191. 8 See Sam Solecki, “An Interview with Michael Ondaatje” (1975), in Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje, ed. Sam Solecki (Montreal, QC: Véhicule Press, 1985): pp. 13–27. 9 On film see Stephen Scobie, “Two Authors in Search of a Character,” Canadian Literature 54 (1972): 37–55; Dennis Cooley, “‘I am here on the edge:’ Modern Hero/Postmodern Poetics in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid,” in Spider Blues, pp. 211–39; and Heighton, “Kinetic Techniques.” On photography, Perry Nodelman, “The Collected Photographs of Billy the Kid,” Canadian Literature 87 (1980): 68–79; Judith Owens, “‘I send you a picture:’ Ondaatje’s Portrait of Billy the Kid,” Studies in Canadian Literature 8 (1) (1983), accessed 23 April 2007, http://www.lib.unb.ca; Peter Sims, “Photography ‘In Camera,’” Canadian Literature 113–14 (1987): 145–66; Lorraine York, The Other Side of Dailiness: Photography in the Works of Alice Munro, Timothy Findley, Michael Ondaatje, and Margaret Laurence (Toronto, ON: ECW Press, 1988); and Timothy Dow Adams, Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography (Chapel Hill, NC & London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). On comics, Dominick Grace, “Ondaatje and the Charlton Comics’ Billy the Kid,” Canadian Literature 133 (1992): 199–203; and on painting, John Cooke, The Influence of Painting on Five Canadian Writers: Alice Munro, High Hood, Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje (Lewiston, New York and Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1996). 10 Garrett-Petts, “Garry Disher, Michael Ondaatje, and the Haptic Eye,” 43. 11 Eleanor Wachtel, “An Interview with Michael Ondaatje” (1992), Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (1994): 250–61 (252) and (256). 12 Critics who have discussed the dialectics of the self include Constance Rooke, “Dog in a Grey Room: The Happy Ending of Coming Through Slaughter,” in Spider Blues, pp. 268–92; Siemerling Discoveries of the Other; and most recently Sofie de Smyter, “Michael Ondaatje’s Coming through Slaughter: Disrupting the Boundaries of Self and Other,” English Studies 88 (6) (2007): 682–98. 13 Arun Mukherjee, “The Poetry of Michael Ondaatje and Cyril Dabydeen: Two Responses to Otherness,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 20 (1) (1985): 49–67; Mundwiler, Work, Image, Imagination; Bök, “Destructive Creation;” and Lorraine York, “Whirling Blindfolded in the House of Woman: Gender Politics in the Poetry and Fiction of Michael Ondaatje,” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (1994): 71–91. For a critique of these, see Wil Verhoeven, “How Hyphenated Can You Get? A Critique of Pure Ethnicity,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 29 (3) (1996), accessed 1 May 2004, http://0-lion.chadwyck.co.uk 14 Jon Pearce, “Moving to the Clear: Michael Ondaatje,” in Twelve Voices: Interviews with Canadian Poets, ed. Jon Pearce (Ottawa, ON: Borealis Press, 1980): pp. 131–43 (p.134); and Ed Jewinski, Michael Ondaatje: Express Yourself Beautifully (Toronto, ON: ECW Press, 1994): p. 124. 15 In a recent article Lee Spinks performs a reading of The Collected Works against the Deleuzian notions of singularity and minor politics, arguing that Ondaatje’s work “reflects upon what is lost in the movements of assimilation that constitute collective historical memories” (Lee Spinks, “Sense and

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20 21 22 23 24 25 26

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Singularity: Reading Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid,” Canadian Literature 197 (2008): 62–78 (71)). While resonant with the tenor of some of my readings (in particular the loss of singularity in the process of historicization), Spinks’s analysis is too reliant on the inflexibility of the molar/ molecular dichotomy in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, which runs the risk of widening the gap between phenomenological experience and historical context. In this sense, I find the haptic-optical continuum put forward by Laura Marks a more productive framework. Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems (London and Basingstoke: Picador, 1989): p. 6. Ibid., p. 20 [emphasis mine]. Garrett-Petts, “Garry Disher, Michael Ondaatje, and the Haptic Eye,” 45. For an interesting essay on the implication of the reader in a poem’s “seductive” performance of “discard,” see Catherine Bates, “Dancing Discard: Michael Ondaatje’s Elimination Dance,” Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings 10 (2) (2010): 19–31 (23). Ondaatje’s major source about the life of Billy the Kid, Walter Noble Burns’s semi-documentary account The Saga of Billy the Kid, has been artistically “manipulated” in The Collected Works. All statements by Sallie Chisum about Billy and Pat from Burns’s account have become found poems (see Ondaatje, The Collected Works, pp. 30, 52, 87, 89; as well as Walter Noble Burns, The Saga of Billy the Kid (New York: Doubleday, 1926): pp. 15–19). Similarly, Paulita Maxwell’s statements (Ondaatje, The Collected Works, pp. 19, 29, 96) and Judge Warren Bristol’s verdict (Ondaatje, The Collected Works, p. 80) are framed with white borders, which lends them a photographic effect (see Burns, The Saga of Billy the Kid, pp. 194–6 and 183–4). Ondaatje, The Collected Works, p. 10 [emphasis mine]. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 16 and 43. Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., pp. 76–7. Garrett-Petts interprets the first empty frame not as a missing but as an overexposed photograph of Billy (Garrett-Petts, “Garry Disher, Michael Ondaatje, and the Haptic Eye,” 42). Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002): p. xvi. Ondaatje, The Collected Works, p. 11. Bök, “Destructive Creation,” 111. Annick Hillger makes a claim similar to mine, regarding the violence in Ondaatje’s texts: it “resonates with echoes of the suppression that the body and its senses have undergone in the age of reason” (Hillger, Not Needing All the Words, p. 31). However, her argument perpetuates the dualism between body and reason, and does not engage explicitly with the impact of embodiment on the reading process and historiography. In Huffman’s original letter, from which Ondaatje has borrowed the quoted passage, the description relates two different occasions: first, the photographer refers to a picture of his daughter Bessie (not of Billy the Kid), and secondly, he refers to his range pictures of buffalos in the 1880s (the part describing taking

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40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58

Notes pictures from the saddle). See Mark H. Brown and W. R. Felton, L. A. Huffman: Photographer of the Plains (New York: Henry Halt and Co., 1955): p. 43. Ondaatje, The Collected Works, p. 5. Ibid., p. 19. According to Burns, the only existing photograph (a tintype) of Billy the Kid was a possession of the Maxwell family; the original was destroyed in a fire, but many copies of it (made using modern technologies) have survived (see Burns, The Saga of Billy the Kid, pp. 194–95). In the 1980s, however, a second of the original four tintypes that the Kid had taken was discovered and it is currently owned by the Lincoln County Heritage Trust (see Dow Adams, Light Writing and Life Writing, pp. 102–10). This echoes the leitmotif in Coming through Slaughter: the negative of Buddy’s only existing photograph is destroyed but for the ten prints that Bellocq develops, whose owners remain unknown. Unlike The Collected Works, Coming through Slaughter displays the photograph. Ondaatje, The Collected Works, p. 107. Ibid., p. 98. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 13. This first image is one of those edited by Ondaatje: it is a cropped close-up of a cavalry officer at what Huffman’s photograph, “Grave of Colonel Keogh” (Brown and Felton, L. A. Huffman, p. 111), reveals to be a military cemetery; this latter contextual detail is unclear in Ondaatje’s version because of the cropping. Ondaatje, The Collected Works, p. 23. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 48. Brown and Felton, L. A. Huffman, p. 34. Ondaatje, The Collected Works, p. 46. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 88. Ibid., p. 104. Ibid., p. 105. Ondaatje, Slaughter, frontispiece [unpaginated]. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., epigraph to frontispiece [unpaginated]. Ibid., p. 98. The authorship of the photograph used by Ondaatje remains unknown, even though Coming through Slaughter suggests that the picture has been taken by Bellocq. Ondaatje, Slaughter, p. 52. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 21. This resounds with Roland Barthes’s definition of rereading not as a copy of the same, the consumption of “the commercial and ideological habits of our society,” but as “the return of the different” that “saves the text from repetition”: “If we immediately reread the text, it is in order to obtain [. . .] not the real text, but a plural text: the same and new.”

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62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

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(Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, preface Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992): pp. 15–16). Ondaatje, Slaughter, p. 67. Barbour, Michael Ondaatje, p. 103. Another instance of Ondaatje’s manipulation of historical sources is his claim that Bolden worked as a barber and edited the scandal sheet The Cricket; see Dow Adams, Light Writing and Life Writing, pp. 110–17; and Donald Marquis, In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz, revised edition (New Orleans, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2005): pp. 6–8. Ondaatje, Slaughter, p. 7. Ibid., p. 8. Ondaatje, The Collected Works, p. 20. Ondaatje, Slaughter, p. 2. Ibid., p. 143 [emphasis mine]. Ibid., p. 144. Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., p. 55. There is no evidence that the historical photographer and the jazzman knew each other. According to the source on Bellocq’s life and work that Ondaatje used (Lee Friedlander and John Szarkowski, E. J. Bellocq: Storyville Portraits, ed. John Szarkowski, preface Lee Friedlander (London: Scolar Press [1978])), the photographer’s plates were damaged after his death, most likely by wear and tear, whereas those deliberately scratched were most likely damaged by Bellocq’s brother. Fictional Bellocq’s “romanticization” of the photographs is Ondaatje’s own invention. The photographs in Storyville Portraits are not reproduced in Coming through Slaughter; similarly to the verbal diagram of Bolden’s band photograph, they have been verbally translated and re-invented by the writer (see Friedlander and Szarkowski, E. J. Bellocq: Storyville Portraits, plates 3, 5–6, 18–19, 20, 26–7, 29 and 33). Ondaatje, Slaughter, p. 55. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” pp. 214–17. Sims, “Photography ‘In Camera,’” 155. Ondaatje, Slaughter, p. 54. Ibid., p. 55. Ibid., p. 59. Marks, The Skin of the Film, p. 183. Ondaatje, Slaughter, p. 141. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., p. 151. Michael Ondaatje referred to Coming through Slaughter as “a soup,” a warning for the blend of fact and fiction (Jewinski, Express Yourself Beautifully, p. 99), whereas Saklofske describes it as a “scrapbook” (Jon Saklofske, “The Motif of the Collector and Implications of Historical Appropriation in Ondaatje’s Novels,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 6 (3) (2004), accessed 11 February 2005, http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/ clcweb04-3/saklofske04.html), which is a leitmotif of Ondaatje’s later works such as Running in the Family and The English Patient.

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84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104

Ondaatje, Slaughter, p. 98. Ibid., p. 83. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 15. Ondaatje, Slaughter, p. 125. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid., p. 124. Ibid., p. 126. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid., p. 138. Ibid. Ibid., p. 139. Ibid., p. 95. Ibid., p. 94. Ibid., p. 95. Ibid., p. 170. Ibid., p. 145. Solecki, “An Interview with Michael Ondaatje,” p. 20. Testa, “He Did Not Work Here for Long,” 156. Ibid., 163. Mundwiler, Work, Image, Imagination, pp. 117–21. Testa, “He Did Not Work Here for Long,” 156 and 158–62; and Finkle, “From Page to Screen.” 105 Ondaatje says in the same interview: I’d just finished the actual writing of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and there was a real sense of words meaning nothing to me anymore, and I was going around interpreting things into words. If I saw a tree I just found myself saying tree [. . .] I just felt I had to go into another field, something totally visual. (Solecki, “An Interview with Michael Ondaatje,” p. 14) 106 See Solecki, “An Interview with Michael Ondaatje,” p. 15. Ironically, Derek Finkle points out that Ondaatje’s least successful cinematic project, Love Clinic, is the one over which he did not have complete control (Finkle, “From Page to Screen,” 182–3). Minghella’s adaptation of The English Patient, in this sense, will be interesting to discuss in terms of the film’s relative popularity with audiences and critics, and Ondaatje’s somewhat limited role in its production (as a consultant). 107 Sons of Captain Poetry presents a portrait of the Canadian visual and sound poet bpNichol; The Clinton Special documents the revival performance of a play set in rural Ontario; and Carry on Crime and Punishment features Ondaatje’s wife and artist, Kim Ondaatje, and his friends, the Kingston poets Tom Marshall and Stuart MacKinnon. 108 Testa, “He Did Not Work Here for Long,” 161. 109 Unlike the 1970 version, which is 35 minutes long, the 2004 version is 6 minutes shorter as Ondaatje edited several scenes. The main difference between the two versions is the opening scene: whereas in the 1970 original the opening shot is of several cows along with unrecognizable noises in the background, in the 2004 version it tracks Barrie and Ellie Nichol walking down a street with bp reciting his poetry in voiceover. To my knowledge, there is no difference between the later versions and the originals of the other two films.

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110 In 1970 Michael Ondaatje and bpNichol were winners of the Governor General’s Award; bp for his poetry, one of the works in the collection being The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid (Toronto: Weed/Flower Press, 1970), and Ondaatje for poetry and prose with The Collected Works. Nichol’s version of the Billy the Kid legend is much shorter and less plot-driven than Ondaatje’s. Focused primarily on formal experimentation with rhythm, rhyme, and sound, bp’s poem also addresses issues one can find in Ondaatje’s text, such as the contingency and unreliability of history and representation. 111 Michael Ondaatje, dir., Sons of Captain Poetry (Mongrel Media, 2004) [DVD], 14:39. 112 Ondaatje, The Collected Works, p. 94. 113 Gandelman, Reading Pictures, p. 55. 114 Solecki, “An Interview with Michael Ondaatje,” p. 16. 115 Alan Filewod, Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada (Toronto, ON and London: University of Toronto Press, 1987), p. 17. As documentary theater was part of Canadian alternative theater in the 1960s and 1970s, and since one of the major external influences was agitprop drama, it had significant political underpinnings. As a reaction to traditional hierarchies of theater production, documentary plays were more often than not actor-created. The printed version, Theatre Passe Muraille, The Farm Show: A Collective Creation (Toronto, ON: Coach House Press, 1976), acknowledges its collective authorship. 116 Filewod, Collective Encounters, p. 27. 117 In an interview with David Young, part of the extras of the Mongrel Media DVD of Ondaatje’s films, Ondaatje explains that the reason some shots are in color, and some are in black and white, is financial rather than artistic (see “Interviews about The Farm Show,” in Films by Michael Ondaatje (Mongrel Media, 2004) [DVD]).

Chapter 2 1 Felman and Laub, Crises of Witnessing, p. 108. 2 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory; and Felman and Laub, Crises of Witnessing. 3 Felman, “Education and Crisis,” p. 17. 4 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. George Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 5 Felman, “Education and Crisis,” p. 24. 6 Caruth, “Recapturing the Past,” p. 155. 7 Felman, “Education and Crisis,” p. 53. 8 Hirsch, “Marked by Memory,” p. 88. 9 Charles Sanders Peirce, Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotics by Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. James Hoopes (Chapel Hill, NC and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991): p. 181. 10 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 11.

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11 For a critique of positivist trends in historiography, see Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994): pp. 69–111. 12 See Jill Bennett and Rosanne Kennedy, eds., World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 13 LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, p. 41. 14 Hutcheon, “Michael Ondaatje: Interview,” p. 201. 15 Ondaatje, Family, pp. 70–1. 16 Felman and Laub, Crises of Witnessing, pp. 70–1. 17 Jeffrey Orr presents a convincing argument about Ondaatje’s affective “(re) positioning of the reader” of the photographic material in Running in the Family: “from approaching the images included in the text as evidential illustrations of the historical truth value of the narrative to approaching them as family photographs with emotional, rather than evidential, value.” (Jeffrey D. Orr, “Photographic Empathy: Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants,” Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings 10 (2) (2010): 31–43 (31)) 18 “Writing wrong is an attempt to right wrongs, to refuse to keep private, solitary suffering locked away, to put one’s story into the public domain [. . .] and place it in a discourse that makes the story shareable with others.” (Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw, “Introduction,” in Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community, pp. 1–24 (p. 14)) 19 Kanaganayakam, “A Trick with a Glass,” 40. 20 Mukherjee, “The Poetry of Michael Ondaatje and Cyril Dabydeen,” 57. For critical responses to Mukherjee, see Suwanda Sugunasiri, “‘Sri Lankan’ Canadian Poets: The Bourgeoisie that Fled the Revolution,” Canadian Literature 132 (1992): 60–79; Wil Verhoeven, “How Hyphenated Can You Get?;” and Minoli Salgado, Writing Sri Lanka, pp. 128–36. 21 Salgado, Writing Sri Lanka, p. 130. See also Sangeeta Ray, “Memory, Identity, Patriarchy: Projecting a Past in the Memoirs of Sara Suleri and Michael Ondaatje,” Modern Fiction Studies 39 (1) (1993): 37–58; Graham Huggan, “Exoticism and Ethnicity in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family,” Essays in Canadian Writing 57 (1995): 116–28; Ajay Heble, “‘Rumours of Topography:’ The Cultural Politics of Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family,” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (1994): 186–203; and Neluka Silva, “The Anxieties of Hybridity: Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37 (2) (2002): 71–83. 22 See Linda Hutcheon, “Running in the Family: The Postmodernist Challenge,” in Spider Blues, pp. 301–14; Cynthia Carey, “Re–inventing (Auto)-biography: The (Im)possible Quest of Michael Ondaatje in Running in the Family,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 24 (1) (2001): 41–51; Joanne Saul, Writing the Roaming Subject, pp. 33–56; and Matthew Bolton, “Michael Ondaatje’s ‘Well-Told Lie:’ The Ethical Invitation of Historiographic Aesthetics,” Prose Studies 30 (3) (2008): 221–42. 23 Ondaatje, Family, pp. 205–6. 24 Interestingly, the Credits are not included in the Picador edition used throughout this book. But they are present in the first edition; see Michael Ondaatje, Coming through Slaughter (London: Boyars, 1979): p. 161. 25 Ondaatje, Slaughter, p. 19.

Notes 26 27 28 29

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38

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Ibid., p. 19. Ondaatje, Family, p. 26. Ibid., p. 201. Geetha Ganapathy-Dore, “Fathoming Private Woes in a Public Story: A Study of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 6 (3) (2002), accessed 1 May 2004, http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/ jouvert; Jon Kertzer, “Justice and the Pathos of Understanding in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” English Studies in Canada 29 (3–4) (2003): 116– 38; Teresa Derrickson, “Will the ‘Un-truth’ Set You Free? A Critical Look at Global Human Rights Discourse in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 15 (2004): 131–52; Manav Ratti, “Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and the Aestheticization of Human Rights,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 35 (1–2) (2004): 121–41; and David Farrier, “Gesturing towards the Local: Intimate Histories in Anil’s Ghost,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 41 (1) (2005): 83–93. Qadri Ismail, “A Flippant Gesture towards Sri Lanka: A Review of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” Pravada 6 (9) (2000): 24–9; Tom LeClair, “The Sri Lankan Patients,” The Nation (1 June 2000); Pradeep Jeganathan, “Discovery: Anthropology, Nationalist Thought, Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan, and an Uncertain Descent into the Ordinary,” Lines (2002), accessed 18 June 2007, http://www.lines-magazine.org; Marlene Goldman, “Representations of Buddhism in Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 6 (3) (2004), accessed 11 February 2005, http:// clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb04-3/goldman04.html; Minoli Salgado, Writing Sri Lanka, pp. 136–46; and John McClure, Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2007): pp. 162–91. Hilde Staels, “A Poetic Encounter with Otherness: The Ethics of Affect in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” University of Toronto Quarterly 76 (3) (2007): 977–89; and Gillian Roberts, “Ethics and Healing: Hospital/ity and Anil’s Ghost,” University of Toronto Quarterly 76 (3) (2007): 962–76. Ondaatje, Ghost, p. 11. Ibid., p. 27. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta/Penguin, 1991): p. 19. Claudia Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 13. Scarry’s argument about the representational potential of the body is resonant with the representational theories of affects, which aim to reconcile the dichotomy between cognitive and perceptual understanding of emotions. A major proponent of representational theory, Louis Charland concludes: “Feelings are representational . . . feeling is representing” (Louis Charland, “Feeling and Representing: Computational Theory and the Modularity of Affect,” Synthese 105 (3) (1995): 273–301 (276)); see also Michael Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). Victoria Burrows’s discussion of the novel as a compassionate and empathic act of listening to the whispered histories of postcolonial trauma resonates

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46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56

Notes with some of my readings. Burrows directs her analysis of Ondaatje’s novel against what she sees as a prevalently “white” trauma theory critical camp; in her treatment of Sri Lanka’s almost uniform postcoloniality, however, she risks simplifying the country’s multiple political, social, and religious contexts as well as Ondaatje’s response to the conflicts. (Victoria Burrows, “The Heterotopic Spaces of Postcolonial Trauma in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” Studies in the Novel 40 (1–2) (2008): 161–77.) Ondaatje, Family, p. 22. Ibid., p. 200. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., p. 201. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., p. 198. JVP (Janatha Vimukti Peramuna, or People’s Liberation Front) was a socialist political movement that has progressively transformed its identity into political Sinhala-Buddhism (see Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka, foreword Lal Jayawardena (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992)). Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1997): pp. 8–9. Ondaatje, Family, p. 163. Ibid., p. 29. Ondaatje, Ghost, p. 259. For a detailed analysis of Ondaatje’s use of visual material in Running in the Family as a way of questioning readers’ expectations and reading practices, see Orr, “Photographic Empathy.” Ondaatje, Family, p. 9. Ibid., p. 17. This beginning of the biographical narrative has been pointed out in Carey, “Re-inventing (Auto)-biography,” 43. Ondaatje, Family, p. 64. Ibid., p. 63. Ondaatje’s translation of the map of colonial Ceylon also takes into account cartographies other than the Eurocentric North-South orientation model. This can be attributed to one of Ondaatje’s acknowledged sources, Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon, intro. S. Saparamadu (Maharagama: Saman Press, 1958), which contains a map of Ceylon, with an East-West orientation; at the same time, Orientalist decorations abound too — the top left-hand (north-east) corner shows a decorated elephant and three “natives,” whereas the bottom right-hand (south-west) corner displays two cherubim-like European cartographers. For comparison, see Ondaatje’s description of the maps of Ceylon: Around it a blue-combed ocean busy with dolphin and sea-horse, cherub and compass [. . .]. At the edge of the maps the scrolled mantling depicts ferocious slipper-footed elephants, a white queen offering a necklace to natives who carry tusks and a conch, a Moorish king who stands amidst the power of books and armour. (Ondaatje, Family, p. 63)

57 Ondaatje, Family, p. 147.

Notes

161

58 Ibid., p. 56. 59 This resonates with Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin’s emphasis on the role of syncretism in postcolonial literature, enacted through the successive processes of abrogation (rejecting the center’s power over the means of communication) and appropriation (capturing and molding the metropolitan language to new usages). Aiming to dismantle notions of authenticity and purity, syncretic forms both unsettle colonial essentialist structures and renounce postcolonial reverse essentialism. (Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures, 2nd edn. (London and New York: Routledge, 2002): pp. 38–78.) 60 Ondaatje, Family, p. 41. 61 Silva, “The Anxieties of Hybridity,” 80–81; and Heble, “Rumours of Topography,” 191. 62 Ondaatje, Family, p. 75. 63 Ibid., p. 25. 64 Ibid., p. 27. 65 Ibid., p. 24. 66 Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line, pp. 173–4. 67 An instance of such an acquisition of power by a minority is the political situation of post-Independence Ceylon (subsequently Sri Lanka). Inhabited by Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, and Burgher communities, and being granted its independence in 1948, the country embarked on a hectic process of nation-state building. The first three elections were won by the UNP (United National Party), whose policies were avowedly pro-Western. Subsequent governments alternated between those led by SLFP (Sri Lanka Freedom Party, left-wing nationalist coalition) and UNP, actively promoting Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism and, thus, marginalizing the Tamil, Muslim, and Burgher communities. The most egregious acts of nationalism were the 1948 Citizenship Act, which took away voting rights from the descendants of the Indian Tamils who had migrated in nineteenth century as plantation workers; the 1956 Sinhala-only Act endorsed by Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike (SLFP), which not only declared Sinhala as the official language of Sri Lanka, but also in regions where schooling in Tamil had been allowed, favored Sinhala for administrative and employment purposes; and the 1979 Terrorism Prevention Act of President Jayawardene (UNP), which allowed detention without trial for any unlawful activities (targeting primarily Tamil political movements) and gave absolute powers to the police. The resulting friction between the Sinhalese and the Tamil communities, which erupted in the anti-Tamil riots of 1956, 1958, 1977, 1981, and 1983, has led to a number of states of emergency, two assassinations of heads of state (Prime Minister Bandaranaike in 1959 and President Premadasa in 1993), the signing of the Indo-Sri Lankan Peace Accord (1987) — which allowed the Indian army to enter Sri Lanka and enforce the accord in the Northern and Eastern provinces — as well as the violent activities of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and militant bikkhus (Buddhist monks). See Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Ceylon (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964); E. F. C. Ludowyk, The Story of Ceylon (London: Faber and Faber, 1967); Satchi Ponnambalam, Sri Lanka: The National Question and the Tamil Liberation (London: Zed Books, 1983); K. M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1981); and Stanley Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed?.

162

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68 Ondaatje, Family, p. 22. 69 Deleuze and Guattari define the rhizomatic map thus: The map is open and connectable in all its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways. (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 12)

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83

84

85 86 87 88 89 90

See also Graham Huggan, “Decolonizing the Map: Post-colonialism, Poststructuralism and the Cartographic Connection,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 20 (4) (1989): 115–31. Ernest MacIntyre, “Outside of Time: Running in the Family,” in Spider Blues, pp. 315–19 (p.315). Ondaatje, Family, p. 83. Ibid., pp. 83–84. Ibid., p. 54. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., pp. 85–86. Ibid., pp. 95–97. Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., pp. 92–94. Ibid., pp. 80–81. See Laura Marks’s analysis of the experience of smell as simultaneously transient and communal (Marks, The Skin of the Film, p. 114). Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, on the other hand, discuss the ideological evocation and manipulation of smell as determined by the need to legitimate and reinforce class, ethnic or racial boundaries (Constance Classen, David Howes and Anthony Synnott, eds., Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London and New York: Routledge: 1994): pp. 161–79). Knox’s account of the thalagoya mentions only its palliative effect for upset stomachs. See Family, p. 74; and Knox, An Historical Relation, p. 50. Ondaatje, Family, p. 74. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “What Is a Minor Literature?” in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, foreword Réda Bensmaïa (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986): pp. 16–27 (20). Untranslated words in postcolonial texts are described by Ashcroft et al. as “directly metonymic of that cultural difference which is imputed by the linguistic variation.” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, p. 52.) Ondaatje, Family, p. 110. Ondaatje, Family, p. 85. Ondaatje, Ghost, p. 102. Ibid., p. 176. Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 9. Ondaatje, Ghost, pp. 64–5.

Notes 91 92 93 94 95 96

97 98 99 100

101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120

121

163

Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p. 50. Ondaatje, Ghost, p. 118. Ibid., p. 104. Ibid., p. 119. Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient, 2nd edn. (New York: Vintage, 1996): pp. 225–6. Anil’s and Kip’s longing for their ayahs can be seen as an instance of their privileged socio-economic position in Sri Lanka and the Punjab, respectively. While the sexuality of this “comforting love” (Ondaatje, Patient, p. 226) risks perpetuating cultural and gender stereotypes, the attachment to the ayah can also be read as an affiliative alternative of the love for the genealogical mother — an absence that neither Anil nor Kip dwells on at all. Ondaatje, Ghost, p. 120. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 102. Ibid., p. 81. A sequel to the Mahāvamsa (sixth century CE), the Cūlavamsa is a Sinhalese chronicle of Sri Lanka, written in Pali. Both of these chronicles were compiled by bikkhus (Buddhist monks), attempting to build continuity between the parnibbāna of the Buddha, the preservation of Buddhism on the island, and the settling of Sri Lanka by the Sinhalese. Combining religious bias and racial identitarianism (subsequently bolstered by nineteenth-century studies proving the Aryan origins of the Sinhalese language), the Mahāvamsa and the Cūlavamsa have been used as powerful tools of nationalist indoctrination. (See de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka; Ludowyk, The Story of Ceylon; and Ponnambalam, The National Question.) Ondaatje, Ghost, p. 81. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., p. 193. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 193. Ibid., p. 278. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 279. Ibid., pp. 156–7. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 44. Ondaatje, Family, p. 179. Ondaatje, Ghost, p. 44. Ibid., pp. 55–6. Ibid., p. 56. The constant threat of dissolution of the subject that the abject poses springs from its corruption and transgression of normative paradigms from within. It is through the sublimation of art that the abject can be controlled and purified, separated from the “I” and made sacred. (Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp. 17 and 65.) Ondaatje, Ghost, pp. 39–40.

164

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122 Despite his detailed Author’s Note and Acknowledgements, listing all scientific, historical, and literary sources used, in an interview with Dave Weich Ondaatje refers to the difficulty of writing impartially and responsibly about the war in Sri Lanka: You have someone who is a part of the country, and in a way, has to betray it. It’s an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your own home country. What exactly is the morality? What is your responsibility to the place you come from? [. . .] I wasn’t sure how to write that story, how to write about the war in Sri Lanka. I decided to write from the point of view of people who are not involved in the politics, not involved actively in war. (Dave Weich, “Michael Ondaatje’s Cubist Civil War” (2000), accessed 9 August 2001, http://www.powells.com/authors/ ondaatje.html) 123 Ondaatje, Ghost, p. 134. 124 Minoli Salgado argues that Ondaatje’s presentation of syncretic Buddhism, as well as his emphasis on intra-Sinhalese violence in the South, offers a more complicated engagement with the political, religious, and ethnic conflict, as well as a subtler critique of the “culturally exclusive reading of Theravāda Buddhism” officially sanctioned in Sri Lanka than critics such as Qadri Ismail give him credit for. (Salgado, Writing Sri Lanka, pp. 137–41.) 125 Ondaatje, Ghost, p. 154. The complicity of Western Christianity in Sri Lankan politics is exemplified the role the Theosophical Society of Colonel Henry Olcott and Madame Helena Blavatsky played in the rise of nineteenth-century Protestant Buddhism, which represented a particular European interpretation of Buddhism, shaped by rationalist and anti-ritualistic ethos. According to John McClure, the influence of British colonial occupation and Christianization on Buddhism in Sri Lanka can be assessed in two different ways: one the one hand, scholars such as Tambiah and Ponnambalam attribute the rise of a nationalist and aggressive Sinhala Buddhism to the secularization and urbanization of the faith (see Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed?; and Ponnambalam, The National Question); on the other, Joanna Macy and Richard Gombrich discuss the participation of Buddhist monks in politics and social struggle — for example, the activities of the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement — as an instantiation of the Buddhist belief in selfless involvement in the world. (See Joanna Macy, Dharma and Development: Religion as Resource in the Sarvodaya Self-help Movement (West Hartford, CN: Kumarian Press, 1985); Richard F. Gombrich, Theravāda Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988); and John McClure, Partial Faiths, pp. 182–7.) 126 Ondaatje, Ghost, p. 99. 127 See Gombrich, Theravāda Buddhism, pp. 122–4 and 146. 128 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Medieval Sinhalese Art, 2nd edn. (New York: Pantheon, 1956): pp. 70–5. In Coomaraswamy’s account, the nētra mańgalya ritual is described as having a Hindu origin and being traditionally performed by royalty. While this suggests that the sacred and the secular orders sustain and reinforce each other, Coomaraswamy’s analysis confirms that Buddhism on the island of Sri Lanka is more syncretic than nationalist thought would admit.

Notes

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129 Kevin Trainor, Relics, Ritual and Representations in Buddhism: Rematerializing the Sri Lankan Theravāda Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997): p. 27. 130 Nancy Wood, Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (Oxford: Berg, 1999): p. 21. 131 Ibid., p. 29. 132 Ondaatje, Ghost, p. 300. 133 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 136. 134 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 14. Foucault makes a similar conclusion about the spectacle of public execution as a device for the reaffirmation of the sovereign’s power in the ancient regime: “The ceremony of punishment [. . .] is an exercise of ‘terror’ [. . .] to make everyone aware, through the body of the criminal, of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign power” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 49). 135 Whereas in Foucault’s analysis the participation of the audience-as-witness in the humiliation of the corporeal (usually of a deviant “other”) validates the rule of the sovereign/law, in Scarry’s argument this collaborative witnessing is expressed by the audience’s willingness to “lend” their own bodies to their sovereign/government/nation (e.g., in the case of war). 136 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 58. 137 Ondaatje, Ghost, p. 187. 138 Ibid., p. 186. 139 Ibid., p. 187. 140 Marks, Touch, p. xvi. 141 Ondaatje, Ghost, pp. 306–7.

Chapter 3 1 Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 190. 2 For more recent articulations of this argument, see Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001); and Chris Bongie, Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/colonial Politics (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008). 3 Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial, pp. 44–5. 4 Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004). 5 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, p. 65. 6 Bongie, Friends and Enemies, p. 16. 7 Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001); Nicholas Harrison, Postcolonial Criticism: History, Theory and the Work of Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003); and Bongie, Friends and Enemies, pp. 15–24. 8 Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic, p. 2. 9 Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial, p. xx; Bongie, Friends and Enemies, p. 21. 10 Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line, pp. 173–4.

166

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11 Simone Bignall, “Indigenous People and a Deleuzian Theory of Practice,” in Deleuzian Encounters: Studies in Contemporary Social Issues, ed. Anna Hickey-Moody and Peta Malins (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): pp. 197–211. 12 See Hardt and Negri, Empire; Ahmad, In Theory; and Glissant, Poetics of Relation. 13 Marks, Touch, p. xvi. 14 Ondaatje, Lion, p. 145. 15 Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, p. 94. See also Linda Hutcheon, “Ex-centric,” Canadian Literature 117 (1988): 132–35; and Carol L. Beran, “Ex-centricity: Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising,” Studies in Canadian Literature 18 (1) (1993), accessed 16 July 2004, http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/SCL/ 16 On the sanitary excision of other voices and sights from the official (photographic and print) archives of Toronto, see Dennis Duffy, “Furnishing the Pictures: Arthur S. Goss, Michael Ondaatje and the Imag(in)ing of Toronto,” Journal of Canadian Studies 36 (2) (2001): 106–29; and Dennis Duffy, “A Wrench in Time: A Sub-Sub-Librarian Looks beneath the Skin of a Lion,” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (1994): 125–40. Meredith Criglington discusses representations of the city in the novel as exposing the gaps of untold stories and demolished monuments (Meredith Criglington, “The City as a Site of Counter-Memory in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces and Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion,” Essays on Canadian Writing 81 (2004): 129–51). 17 On the political turn in Ondaatje’s later oeuvre, see Banerjee, The Chutneyfication of History; Beddoes, “Which Side Is It On?”; Bök, “The Secular Opiate”; Frank Davey, Post–National Arguments, pp. 141–56; Stephanie M. Hilger, “Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Rewriting History,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 6 (3) (2004), accessed 11 February 2005 http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb04–3/hilger04.html; Kella, Beloved Communities; Glen Lowry, “Between The English Patients: ‘Race’ and the Cultural Politics of Adapting CanLit,” Essays on Canadian Writing 76 (2002): 216–46; Jodi Lundgren, “‘Colour Disrobed Itself from the Body:’ The Racialized Aesthetics of Liberation in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion,” Canadian Literature 190 (2006): 15–31; D. Mark Simpson, “Minefield Readings: The Postcolonial English Patient,” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (1994): 216–37; Shannon Smyrl, “The Nation as ‘International Bastard:’ Ethnicity and Language in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” Studies in Canadian Literature 28 (2) (2003): 9–38; Robert David Stacey, “A Political Aesthetic: Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion as ‘Covert Pastoral,’” Contemporary Literature 49 (3) (2008): 439–69; and Eleanor Ty, “The Other Questioned: Exoticism and Displacement in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” The International Fiction Review 27 (2000), accessed 15 February 2007, http://www.lib.unb.ca 18 Jewinski, Express Yourself Beautifully, p. 124. 19 Ondaatje, Patient, p. 119. 20 On readings of the novel against trauma theory, see Carrie Dawson, “Calling People Names: Reading Imposture, Confession, and Testimony in and after Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” Studies in Canadian Literature 25 (2) (2000): 50–73; Amy Novak, “Textual Hauntings: Narrating History, Memory, and Silence in The English Patient,” Studies in the Novel 36 (2) (2004): 206–31

Notes

21 22

23

24

25

26

27 28 29 30

167

(231); and Josef Pesch, “Post-Apocalyptic War Histories: Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 28 (2) (1997): 117–39 (132). Lowry, “‘Race’ and the Cultural Politics of Adapting CanLit,” 237. Peter Easingwood, “Sensuality in the Writing of Michael Ondaatje,” in Re-constructing the Fragments of Michael Ondaatje’s Works, ed. Jean-Michel Lacroix (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1999): pp. 79–96 (81). Stephen Scobie, in “The Reading Lesson: Michael Ondaatje and the Patients of Desire,” Essays in Canadian Writing 53 (1994): 92–106, calls the patient “a perfect blank screen” (97). David Williams, “The Politics of Cyborg Communications: Harold Innis, Marshal McLuhan, and The English Patient,” Canadian Literature 156 (1998): 30–55 (43) and (51). Rufus Cook, “Being and Representation in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 30 (4) (1999): 35–49 (44). Tom Penner, “Four Characters in Search of an Author-Function: Foucault, Ondaatje, and the ‘Eternally Dying’ Author in The English Patient,” Canadian Literature 165 (2000): 78–93 (90). John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada (Toronto, ON and London: University of Toronto Press, 1965). Ondaatje, Lion, p. 1. Ibid. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller.” Benjamin outlines the indexical nature of storytelling thus: [Storytelling] does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It skins the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel. (Ibid., p. 91)

In contrast to non-appropriative storytelling, for Benjamin the novel has its origins in the uncounseled solitude of the novelist (p. 87), and its voracious reader “seizes upon his material more jealously than anyone else. He is ready to make it completely his own, to devour it” (p. 99). With reference to Ondaatje’s work, John Cooke highlights the importance of the audience for the storytelling experience (Cooke, The Influence of Painting, p. 207); and Winfried Siemerling and Gordon Gamlin draw attention to the significance of collectivity in In the Skin of a Lion (Siemerling, Discoveries of the Other, p. 154; and Gordon Gamlin, “Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and the Oral Narrative,” Canadian Literature 135 (1992): 68–77 (75)). 31 Ondaatje, Lion, p. 244. This exclamation reminds one of the cinematographic shooting of Billy the Kid’s capture in The Collected Works, where Billy is watching his own capture and introduces a probable second take of the scene with the phrase “Again!” Patrick’s “Lights!” can be interpreted as an invitation for a Take 2 of the story narrated so far. For interpretations of the role of light in Patrick’s narrative, see Winfried Siemerling, “Oral History and the Writing of the Other in Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion,” CLCWeb: Comparative

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32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55

Notes Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 6 (3) (2004), accessed 21 September 2005, http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb04–3/siemerling04.html; and Fotios Sarris, “In the Skin of a Lion: Michael Ondaatje’s Tenebristic Narrative,” Essays on Canadian Writing 44 (1991): 183–201. Ondaatje, Lion, p. 157. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, pp. 125–6. Ondaatje, Lion, p. 144. Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., p. 157. Ibid., p. 145. Ibid. Ibid., p. 109. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 10. On Canada’s federal immigration and assimilation policies in early twentieth century, see Jean R. Burnet and Howard Palmer, Coming Canadians: An Introduction to a History of Canada’s People (Toronto, ON: McClelland and Stewart, 1988): pp. 109–10; Jean Leonard Elliott, ed., Two Nations, Many Cultures: Ethnic Groups in Canada (Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall Canada, 1983): pp. 160–72; and Lillian Petroff, Sojourners and Settlers: The Macedonian Community in Toronto to 1940 (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1995): pp. 59–75. See also Valerie Knowles, Strangers at Our Gates: Canadian Immigration and Immigration Policy, 1540–1997, revised edn. (Toronto, ON: Dundurn Press, 1997); Franca Iacovetta, Paul Draper, and Robert Ventresca, eds., A Nation of Immigrants: Readings in Canadian History, 1840s–1950s (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1997); and Ninette Kelley and Michael Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1998). Ondaatje, Lion, p. 22. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 138. On the significance of the body for articulating the political ambivalence of identity, see Lynette Hunter, Outsider Notes: Feminist Approaches to Nation State Ideology, Writers/Readers and Publishing (Vancouver, BC: Talonbooks, 1996): pp. 229–30; Karen Overbye, “Re-membering the Body: Constructing the Self as Hero in In the Skin of a Lion,” Studies in Canadian Literature 17 (2) (1992), accessed 22 September 2005, http://www.lib.unb.ca; and Lundgren, “The Racialized Aesthetics of Liberation.” Ondaatje. Lion, p. 138. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 1993): pp. 146–7. Ondaatje, Lion, p. 125. Ibid., p. 124. Ibid.

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56 Discussing new modes of artistic appreciation with the introduction of mechanically reproduced art, Benjamin compares such art to the mass destruction brought about by fascist politics: “Fiat ars — pereat mundus,” says Fascism, and [. . .] expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind [. . .] now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art. (Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” p. 235) 57 58 59 60 61 62

Ondaatje, Lion, p. 132. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid., p. 179. Ibid., p. 199. Ibid., p. 184; Martha Butterfield has pointed out that In the Skin of a Lion used to have the working title Available Light (Martha Butterfield, “The One Lighted Room: In the Skin of a Lion,” Canadian Literature 119 (1988): 162–7 (164)). 63 According to the Sumerian epic, upon the request of the elders of Uruk (the city ruled by Gilgamesh), the mother goddess Aruru creates Enkidu in the image of a wild man, whose powers match those of the invincible and oppressive King Gilgamesh. After an initial battle out of which Gilgamesh emerges victorious, the two become close companions and fight a number of creatures set upon them by the gods. The divine punishment for their hubris in killing Huwawa, the monster, and the Bull of Heaven, and for Gilgamesh’s refusal to lie with the goddess Ishtar, is Enkidu’s untimely death. When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh plunges into a long period of mourning, dons the skins of wild beasts, and wanders in the wilderness in an attempt to become Enkidu. See also Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, The Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others, trans. and ed. Stephanie Dalley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and David Ferry, Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1993). 64 In his thefts, Caravaggio is governed by the character of his victims, which he absorbs through the texture of their possessions: He slid his hand down the smoothness of a banister and his palm and fingers luxuriated in it. The intricate light switches! The carpets your feet melted into! He did this with their character — he walked away with their mannerisms and their brand names, their rhythm and abstract tone of their musings. (Ondaatje, Lion, p. 191) 65 66 67 68 69

Ondaatje, Lion, p. 157. Ibid., p. 157. Ibid., p. 130. Ibid., p. 117. Ibid., p. 132.

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70 Jodi Lundgren discusses the references to the tannery workers and dyes in terms of racialized discourse, see Lundgren, “The Racialized Aesthetics of Liberation in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion,” 17–20. For a critical reading of the place of race in the novel, see Glen Lowry, “The Representation of Race in Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion,” CLCWeb Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 6 (3) (2004), accessed 21 September 2005, http:// clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb04–3/lowry04.html 71 Ondaatje, Lion, pp. 130–1. 72 On perceptions of the Balkan region, see Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven, CN and London: Yale University Press, 1998); Andrew Hammond, The Debated Lands: British and American Representations of the Balkans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007); Andrew Hammond, ed., The Balkans and the West: Constructing the European Other, 1945–2003 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Maria Todorova, ed., Balkan Identities: Nation and Modernity (New York and London: New York University Press, 2004); and Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 73 At the time when the novel is set, Macedonia (nowadays FYROM) did not exist as an independent nation-state. However, late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were tumultuous times for the Balkan region. In addition to the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, of which the Balkans were an integral part, local nationalist movements led to the appearance of several small independent nation-states. Macedonia remained a province of the Ottoman Empire, which resulted in a contest between the young Balkan nation-states over its liberation and subsequent annexation. The two Balkan Wars (1912 and 1913) and the First World War exacerbated the situation by dividing Macedonia between Greece, Bulgaria, and the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later to become Yugoslavia). Economic and political crises, the wars, as well as the widely advertised opportunities in the New World, led to massive emigration to North America (USA and Canada), with the Macedonian community in Toronto being the largest outside Macedonia (FYROM). At the same time, the unresolved national status of Macedonia triggered off competition between the governments of each of the interested parties to try to win the Macedonian diaspora. See Loring Danforth, The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Constantine Danopoulos and Kostas Messas, eds., Crises in the Balkans: Views from the Participants (Oxford: Westview Press, 1997); Bogdan Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans, vol. 1 and 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Mark Mazower, The Balkans (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000); and Hugh Poulton, Who Are the Macedonians? (London: Hurst, 1995). 74 Following Pierre Trudeau’s declaration of multiculturalism as Canada’s official federal policy in 1971, the policy was enshrined in legislation in the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and subsequently in the Multiculturalism Act of 1988. Promoting diversity and inclusion, liberal multiculturalism has attempted to silence concerns about race and class as it focuses on the

Notes

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86

87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94

171

illusion of equality and opportunity while disguising the asymmetrical power distribution in Canada. For critiques of Canada’s multiculturalism policy, see Himani Bannerji, The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender (Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2000); Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism (Toronto, ON: Penguin, 1994); Linda Hutcheon, “The Canadian Mosaic: ‘A Melting Pot on Ice:’ The Ironies of Ethnicity and Race,” in Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies (Toronto, ON: Oxford University Press, 1991): pp. 47–68; Karl Peter, “The Myth of Multiculturalism and Other Political Fables,” in Ethnicity, Power, and Politics in Canada, ed. Jorgen Dahlie and Tissa Fernando (Toronto, ON: Methuen, 1981): pp. 56–67; and Valerie Lerda, From Melting Pot to Multiculturalism: The Evolution of Ethnic Relations in the United States and Canada (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990). Ondaatje, Lion, p. 33. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., p. 149. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, pp. 48–51. Ondaatje, Lion, p. 112. Ibid., p. 113. Ibid, p. 170. Carol Beran has interpreted this episode as Patrick’s rejection of subversion, thus upholding the traditional Canadian political values of “peace, order, and good government” (Beran, “Ex-centricity,” para. 17). Fotios Sarris and Gordon Gamlin, on the other hand, see in Patrick’s final “failure” a re-affirmation of life rather than a forfeit of responsibility (Sarris, “Michael Ondaatje’s Tenebristic Narrative,” 199, and Gamlin, “The Oral Narrative,” 75). Ondaatje, Lion, p. 122. Drowsiness is a recurrent feature in the behavior of all characters: Patrick falls asleep before his ride to Marmora to meet with Clara (framing episode), after Small sets him on fire, after the fire in the Muskoka Hotel, and during the blasting of the waterworks. Caravaggio, similarly, falls asleep after the racist attack against him in his prison cell, after he paints himself blue on the penitentiary roof, and while hiding in the mushroom factory after his escape from prison. Temelcoff falls asleep after saving the nun and injuring his arm, and Harris is in a slumber before Patrick climbs up in his office. Ondaatje, Lion, p. 132. Ibid., p. 135. Crary, Suspension of Perception, p. 3. Donna Harraway, “The Persistence of Vision,” in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997): pp. 283–305 (p.286). Ondaatje, Patient, p. 58. Ibid., p. 257. Ibid., p. 103. On the patient’s compromised politics of reading as reaffirming colonial disciplinary practices, see Gillian Roberts, “The Reading Lesson Revisited:

172

95 96

97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108

Notes Educating the English Patient,” Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings 10 (2) (2010): 68–79. Ondaatje, Patient, p. 235. Following the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire (after the end of the First World War), Hungary became for a brief period (four months) a soviet republic and was succeeded by the Kingdom of Hungary in August 1919. Paradoxically, King Charles IV, who had surrendered the throne during the communist rule, was never restored (even though he never officially abdicated). Hence, the Hungarian head of state during the interwar years, Miklós Horthy, also acted as a regent of a kingdom without a king. See László Kontler, Millennium in Central Europe (Budapest: Atlantisz, [1999]); Peter F. Sugar, ed., A History of Hungary (London: Tauris, 1990); and Denis Sinor, History of Hungary (London: Allen and Unwin, 1959). Ondaatje, Patient, p. 7. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 118. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 278. Ibid., p. 150. Ibid., p. 225. Ibid., p. 270. Ibid., p. 84. Peter Sloterdijk defines the complicity of medicine with hegemonic power as the struggle to preserve, and thus to control, life: Doctors define themselves through having to take the side of life. All of medical idealism derives from this unconditional partiality; it is this idealism that even today, down to the most cynical twists, guides the absurd struggles of medicine for the life of moribund bodies, long since decayed. The doctor takes the side of the living body against the corpse. Because living bodies are the source of all power, the body’s helper is a man (Mann) of power. To this extent, the helper himself becomes a kind of wielder of power, since he gains a share of the central authority of all hegemonic power, the power over the life and death of others. Thus the doctor comes into a mediating position: on the one hand, an “absolute” supporter of life; on the other, a partaker in the power of hegemonic powers over life. Herewith the stage is set for the appearance of medical cynicism. (Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 267)

109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116

Ondaatje, Patient, p. 269. Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p. 136. Ibid., p. 300. Ibid., p. 301. Ibid., p. 301. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 4.

Notes 117 118 119 120

121

122 123 124

125 126 127 128

129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138

139

173

Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 8. Claudia Benthien also distinguishes between the active and passive aspects of the feeling of touch, with hands usually being attributed active role and skin passive (Benthien, Skin, pp. 185–202). Derrida’s analysis draws parallels between art and blindness, based on the intermediary role performed by the hand and on the importance of memory and anticipation in both activities. In the passage referred to above, he is drawing on the common etymology of “precipitate” and “anticipate” and the Latin word for “head,” “caput” (Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, pp. 3–5). Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 3. Ibid., p. 20. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, pp. 47 and 70. Crary delineates the shift in the understanding of vision thus: from an objective, camera obscura model, which clearly postulates the boundary between external reality and interior subjectivity, to a subjective and physiological activity, which may be cut off from any external referent. Ondaatje, Patient, pp. 138–9. Ibid., p. 136. Ibid., pp. 140–1. Ibid., p. 261. On the prescription of female identity, see Lilijana Burcar, “Mapping the Woman’s Body in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” Contemporary Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature in English Web, accessed 11 February 2005, http://www.thecore.nus.edu.sg/post/canada/ literature/ondaatje/burcar/burcar1.html Ondaatje, Patient, p. 110. Ibid., p. 111. Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., p. 188. Ibid., p. 192. Ibid., p. 194. Ibid., p. 285. Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., p. 122. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, “The English Patient: ‘Truth Is Stranger than Fiction,’” Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (1994): 141–53 (148); for a detailed analysis of Central European Orientalism and the historical Almásy’s complex positioning, see Eugene Sensenig-Dabbous, “Will the Real Almásy Please Stand Up! Transporting Central European Orientalism via the English Patient,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24 (2) (2004): 163–80. De Zepetnek also points out that while Kip and Caravaggio have received critical attention as the unquestionable other in the novel, the Hungarian and aristocratic elements of the Almásy identity have been discussed under the broad label of “the white man’s burden.” De Zepetnek suggests that the use of the Hungarian word félhomály in the novel, which means “semi-darkness,” “dusk,” or “twilight” is indicative of the patient’s ambiguous otherness (de Zepetnek, “Truth Is Stranger than Fiction,” 142; and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, “Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,

174

140

141

142 143 144 145 146

147 148

Notes ‘History,’ and the Other,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 1 (4) (1999), accessed 11 February 2005, http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb99–4/totosy99–2.html, para. 5). Lorna Irvine, “Displacing the White Man’s Burden in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” British Journal of Canadian Studies 10 (1) (1995): 139–45. A series of important distinctions have been elided in Irvine’s conclusion that have to do with the differences in the political and administrative set up between contiguous empires (such as the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov ones) and colonial imperial structures. See E. J. Hobsbawm, “The End of Empires,” in After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman and Habsburg Empires, ed. Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen (Oxford: Westview Press, 1997): pp. 12–16.; and Alexander Motyl, “Thinking about Empire,” in After Empire, pp. 19–29. A multicultural empire in the past, admired for its tolerant policies towards different ethnic communities and for its role as the Christian bulwark against the other empire of the Ottomans, Austria–Hungary has nostalgically come to stand for imperial sophistication and erudition, cultural fluidity and masterful diplomacy. However, it is the lack of a unifying supranational center and the identitarian pull of each of the nationalities within the empire that have been identified as the prerequisites for its disintegration. Hungary, in particular, acquired the status of an autonomous kingdom within the Austrian empire, while simultaneously embarking on an intensive process of magyarization of its Slavic and German populations. Moreover, the protection of national (and ethnic) interests went hand in hand with the protection of the socio-economic privileges of regional aristocracies. On the history of the Habsburg Empire, see A. J. P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy 1809–1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria–Hungary (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1948); Robert Kann, The Habsburg Empire: A Study in Integration and Disintegration (New York: Octagon Books, 1973); Robert Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire 1526–1918 (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1974); and Solomon Wank, “The Habsburg Empire,” in After Empire, pp. 45–57; on its disintegration, see Karen Barkey, “Thinking about Consequences of Empire,” in After Empire, pp. 99–114; and István Deák, “The Habsburg Empire,” in After Empire, pp. 129–41. Ondaatje, Patient, p. 48. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., p. 27. Unlike the historical artist Michelangelo Caravaggio, who was outlawed for killing Ranuccio Tommasoni in a gambling brawl, Ondaatje’s David Caravaggio is captured and tortured by a Nazi officer, ironically named Ranuccio (see Robert Clark, “Knotting Desire in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37 (2) (2002): 59–70). Ondaatje, Patient, p. 105. Homi Bhabha describes the doubleness of colonial mimicry in the following way: Mimicry is, thus the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which “appropriates” the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however,

Notes

175

a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both “normalized” knowledges and disciplinary powers [. . .] The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority. And it is a double vision that is a result of [. . .] the partial representational recognition of the colonial object. (Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995): p. 86) 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158

159

160

161

162

Ondaatje, Patient, p. 217. Ibid., p. 200. Ibid., p. 284. Ibid., pp. 138–9. Ibid., p. 286. The Tiger Triumphs: The Story of Three Great Divisions in Italy, Inter-Service Public Relations Directorate (London and Tonbridge: Whitefriars, 1946): p. 119. The Tiger Strikes, Directorate of Public Relations (Calcutta: Thackers, 1943): p. viii. The patient compares himself to Goliath (representing aging Caravaggio) and Kip to David (representing, according to the patient, younger Caravaggio). Ondaatje, Patient, p. 176. After his interrogation by the Nazis, Caravaggio is set free but while walking over a mined bridge, the latter explodes and he falls into the Arno, followed by the bearded head of a statue. Caravaggio’s quest for the identity of the anonymous voice giving instructions over the phone during the interrogation is also mirrored in his search for the identity of the statue’s head. For more detailed readings of how questions of fidelity shift the political stance of Minghella’s adaptation, see Sharyn Emery, “‘Call me by my name:’ Personal Identity and Possession in The English Patient,” Literature/Film Quarterly 28 (3) (2000): 210–13; Lowry, “Between The English Patients”; Josef Pesch, “Dropping the Bomb?: On Critical and Cinematic Reactions to Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,” in Re–constructing the Fragments of Michael Ondaatje’s Works, pp. 229–46; Gillian Roberts, “‘Sins of Omission:’ The English Patient, THE ENGLISH PATIENT, and the Critics,” Essays on Canadian Writing 76 (2002): 195–215; and Raymond Aaron Younis, “Nationhood and Decolonization in The English Patient,” Literature/Film Quarterly 26 (1) (1998): 2–8. Roberts, “The English Patient, THE ENGLISH PATIENT, and the Critics,” 198. This conflation of work and author, on the other hand, has been seen as a positive development by Josef Pesch, insofar as the film’s popularity has refueled audiences’ interest in the “original” literary source and earlier texts by the Canadian author (Pesch, “Dropping the Bomb,” p. 244). David L. Kranz, “The English Patient: Critics, Audiences, and the Quality of Fidelity,” Literature/Film Quarterly 31 (2) (2003): 99–110. Kranz points out the difficulty of filming such a postmodern text and the success of Minghella’s adaptation in not becoming a typical “Hollywood whitewash.” The critic also admonishes against Ondaatje’s branding as a “po-co ideologue” exclusively on the basis of his Sri Lankan origins. Bronwen Thomas, “‘Piecing together a mirage:’ Adapting The English Patient for the Screen,” in The Classic Novel: From Page to Screen, ed. Robert

176

Notes Giddings and Erica Sheen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000): pp. 197–232. Thomas acknowledges the singular nature of the adaptation, measuring its success in terms of both the formal qualities of the cinematic medium and its interaction with audiences and literary counterpart: Surely there can be no greater praise for an adaptation of a literary text than that it encourages debate, but also that it exists in interaction with the novel from which it derives. (Thomas, “Piecing together a mirage,” p. 228)

163 Hsuan Hsu, “Post-Nationalism and the Cinematic Apparatus in Minghella’s Adaptation of The English Patient,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 6 (3) (2004), accessed 11 February 2005, http:// clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb04–3/hsu04.html, para.16. These qualities of the illuminating and caressing look are parallel to the ambivalent nature of map-making that Barbara Kennedy explores in the filmic event The English Patient (Barbara Kennedy, “The English Patient: Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence,” in Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002): pp. 147–62. 164 George Bluestone, Novels into Film: Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema, 2nd edn. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973): p. 5. 165 For a more detailed analysis of the mutual influence between verbal and visual arts, see George Bluestone, Novels into Film; Robert Richardson, Literature and Film (Bloomington, IN and London: Indiana University Press, 1969); Bruce Morrissette, Novel and Film: Essays in Two Genres, foreword James Lawler (Chicago, IL and London: Chicago University Press, 1985); and Erica Sheen, “Introduction,” in The Classic Novel: From Page to Screen, pp. 1–13. 166 Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996): p. 21. 167 Even if the film falls short of conveying the full brunt of the anti-imperialist critique of Ondaatje’s novel, it does include elements of political import unspoken for in the original — in particular, the suggestions of same-sex relationships that cut across ethnic and racial lines (in Minghella’s adaptation this is represented by the relationship between Bermann and Kamal). 168 Sharyn Emery observes that this is the first time in the film that Almásy refers to his Hungarian nationality (Emery, “Call me by my name,” 212). 169 On Minghella’s underdevelopment of the Arab characters, somewhat akin to Ondaatje’s primary focus on British and American Orientalization of Asia (India and Japan) at the expense of that of the Maghreb where the novel is set, see Sensenig-Dabbous, “Will the Real Almásy Please Stand Up!,” 173. 170 The scene of Caravaggio’s mutilation — carried out in the film by an Arab nurse — perpetuates cultural and ethnic stereotypes. During the interrogation Caravaggio claims that his only crime is being unfaithful; his Nazi interrogator Muller (connoting German nationality) then calls for the nurse and justifies Caravaggio’s punishment as an Islamic punishment for adultery; see also Pesch, “Dropping the Bomb?,” p. 233; and Hsu, “Post-Nationalism and the Cinematic Apparatus, para. 7) 171 See Roberts, “Sins of Omission,” 210. 172 Thomas, “Piecing together a mirage,” p. 228.

Notes

177

173 Anthony Minghella, The English Patient: A Screenplay (London: Random House, 1997): p. 74. 174 On the male gaze in cinema, see Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (3) (1975): 6–18, as well as John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin, 1977): pp. 45–64; Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams, eds., Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Criticism (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984); and Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, 2nd edn. (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987): pp. 372–402. 175 Minghella, Patient, pp. 118–20. 176 Ibid., p. 68 and 95. 177 Ibid., p. 88 and 90. 178 Ondaatje, Patient, p. 247. 179 Kaja Silverman discusses the dislocation of the female voice from images of the female body as a challenge to the imperative of synchronization in the cinema apparatus: Synchronization plays a major part in the production not only of a homo-centric but an ideologically consistent cinema; by insisting that the body be read through the voice, and the voice through the body, it drastically curtails the capacity of each for introducing into the narrative something heterogeneous or disruptive [. . .] [T]he rule of synchronisation is imposed much more strictly on the female than on the male voice within dominant cinema [. . .] from time to time the male voice speaks from an anonymous and transcendent vantage, “over” the narrative. (Kaja Silverman, “Dis–Embodying the Female Voice,” in Re–vision: Essays in Feminist Criticism, pp. 131–49 (pp.132–33)) 180 Minghella, Patient, p. 96.

Epilogue 1 Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero (New York: Knopf, 2007): pp. 142–3. 2 Anna and Claire are siblings by adoption: after Anna’s and Claire’s mothers die in childbirth in the same week and at the same hospital, Anna’s father “informally” adopts Claire and raises her as his own daughter. Cooper’s parents, on the other hand, are victims of a brutal murder earlier in the novel to which the four-year-old young boy is a surviving witness. He is taken in as a hired hand by Anna’s parents — an adoption that has an added employment element to it. The unconventionality of Anna, Claire, and Coop’s family set up is recurrently implied by their slippages between family roles: Anna’s father adopts Claire because the hospital “owed him a wife” (Ondaatje, Divisadero, p. 11); Anna and Coop become lovers even if raised as siblings; during the violent episode between Anna’s father and the young couple, Anna not only has “Coop’s heart safe within her” (p. 32) but feels that “no girl has had such an intimacy with her father” (p. 140). The suggestion of illicit and somewhat incestuous family

178

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22

23

24 25 26

Notes relationships is later echoed in the description of Roman and Marie-Neige’s secretive conjugality as the “seeming sin of brotherly love” (p. 215) as well as in young Segura’s “sibling-like desire” for Marie-Neige (p. 247). Ondaatje, Divisadero, p. 273. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., p. 142. Ibid., p. 143. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 140. Ibid., p. 222. Ibid., p. 231. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., p. 141. See Natalie Diebschlag’s discussion of the displacement of mimesis in the novel through the fictionalization of the writer’s self in his text (Natalie Diebschlag, “Spectral Encounters: Divisadero and the Ethics of Reading,” Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings 10(2) (2010): 100–11 (105–7). Ondaatje, Divisadero, p. 136. Ibid., p. 140. Ibid., p. 268. Ibid., p. 229. On writers’ complicity with thieving and gambling, see Aritha van Herk, “Ondaatje, Thieves, Thievery, and Theft: Fevered Handwriting,” Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings 10 (2) (2010): 111–24. The voice of the author figure resurfaces at the end of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (Ondaatje, The Collected Works, p. 105), Coming through Slaughter (Ondaatje, Slaughter, p. 170), and The English Patient (Ondaatje, Patient, p. 301), only to dissolve in the middle as exemplified by Lucien Segura’s suicide in a lake at the end of Divisadero (Ondaatje, Divisadero, pp. 272–3). Likewise, Running in the Family, In the Skin of a Lion, and Anil’s Ghost conclude with narrators or protagonists in a liminal state between reality and dream, which has suspended the cognitive powers of their “gaze”: Michael being woken up by the sound of rain and willing his body to “remember everything” (Ondaatje, Family, p. 202); Patrick falling asleep in Harris’s office during his attempt to blast the filtration plant and waking up with the sweat of a dream ready to tell his story to Hana (Ondaatje, Lion, pp. 242–4); and Ananda seeing through the eyes of the Buddha he has painted and being brought back to “the world” by the “sweet” touch of his nephew (Ondaatje, Ghost, p. 307). Ondaatje, Divisadero, p. 193. Ibid., p. 192. Even though the experimental nature of Ondaatje’s later texts is less obvious, there are some mixed-media elements in them too. For instance, Hana’s drawing of the dove-cot where Patrick dies in The English Patient (Ondaatje, Patient, p. 293), the diagrams of the hands of Cooper’s poker games in Divisadero

Notes

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47

48

49

50 51 52

179

(Ondaatje, Divisadero, pp. 56–8), as well as the inclusion of drawings and Ondaatje’s handwriting in The Story. Ondaatje, Divisadero, p. 141. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 133 and 188. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 141. Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., p. 208. Ibid., pp. 138–9. Ibid., p. 200. Ibid., p. 207. Marie-Neige’s stereoscopic versions echo the multiplication of people’s memories of Rafael’s mother Aria — “all of them carrying their own version of Aria, none of them wishing to share it, or dilute it within a group” (Ondaatje, Divisadero, p. 86) — as well as Anna’s splintering into multiple selves after the violent incident on the farm. The novel thus insists on the parallel and simultaneous unfolding of all “spokes of a [. . .] wheel” (Ondaatje, Divisadero, p. 86). Ondaatje, Divisadero, p. 247. Ibid., p. 167. Ibid., p. 253. It becomes clear that Marie-Neige has died of diphtheria during the war. Ondaatje, Divisadero, p. 89. Ibid., p. 265. Ibid., p. 267. As the shore recedes into the background while Segura is pushing the carcass of a boat into the lake for his final journey, he loses the ability “to see everything clearly” (Ondaatje, Divisadero, p. 273) with birds almost flying into their reflections. For a reading of Ondaatje’s poetics of desire as part of an imaginative and aesthetic “return home,” see Chandani Lokuge, “The Return Journey and the Aesthetic of Rasa in Michael Ondaatje’s Poetry,” Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, 10 (2) (2010): 79–92. In her recent essay, “A Poetics of Sense: Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion,” Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings 10 (2) (2010): 57–68, Gail Jones explores the “conspicuously joint poetics” of the body and desire in Ondaatje’s novels In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient as inaugurating “an ethics of gentle regard” and “a politics of relationality” (Ibid., 58) — an approach that resonates with the methodology of the haptic applied in this study. Michael Ondaatje, The Story (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2005). As this publication is unpaginated, for the purposes of the analysis, I shall be quoting from the poem as originally published in Handwriting (Michael Ondaatje, “The Story,” in Handwriting (London, Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador, 2000), pp. 60–6). Ondaatje, “The Story,” p. 60. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., p. 66.

180

Notes

53 For more information on World Literacy Canada and Ondaatje’s involvement in it, see the World Literacy Canada official website http://www.worldlit.ca 54 Ondaatje, “The Story,” p. 60. 55 Ibid., p. 65. 56 Ibid., p. 64. 57 Ibid., p. 60. 58 Ibid., p. 65. 59 van Herk, “Ondaatje, Thieves, Thievery, and Theft,” 112.

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Index abject/abjection 26, 54, 55, 85, 163n. 120 actualization/actuality 29, 94, 95, 96, 97 adaptation (film) 27, 98, 125, 126, 127, 129 Adorno, Theodor 21 affect 3–6, 12–16, 17–20, 21, 55, 64–68, 87, 94–96, 98, 119, 126–28, 139, 143n. 11, 146.n41, 146n. 48, 147n. 53, 148n. 77, 148n. 82, 158n. 17 affect-action-reaction 29 affectionate relationality 90 affectionate witness/ witnessing 68, 89 affective aesthetics 16 affective / affect-driven art / narration 5, 13, 14 affective aspects of language 79 affective cinema 27, 29, 56, 127–28 affective communities 97 affective discomfort 55 affective epistemologies 64, 95 affective potential of the body / powers of the corporeal 34, 87, 107 affective sympathy 95 affective truth 95 affectless 21 appropriation of 16, 123 exchange of 6, 90, 91, 110 and the haptic 16, 28, 69, 94 and ideology 22, 24 micropolitics of 23, 33, 111, 127 and nationalism 87 politicization of 28, 148n. 77 romanticization of 28 regulatory function of 21, 146n. 49 representation of 14–17, 159n. 37

and testimony 65 and trauma 15 Ahmed, Sara 21 Althusser, Louis 22 Amarasekera, Douglas 71, 76 America North 102, 109, 120, 170n. 73 Upper 108, 109 amygdala 86, 90 Andrews, Naveen 129 anesthetics 21 Anil’s Ghost 1, 5, 11, 12, 19, 27, 65–69, 80–81, 86–92, 134, 138, 164n. 122 Anna Karenina 112 Annunciation, The 120 anticipate 117, 173n. 121 Anzieu, Didier 6 Aristotle 6, 8, 143n. 10, 143n. 16 Armstrong, Isobel 4, 25, 94 Asia 72, 76, 82, 84, 108, 121, 176n. 169 assemblage 14, 28, 32, 34, 55, 70, 100, 101, 113, 118, 130 Ashcroft, Bill 109, 161n. 59, 162n. 84 attention/attentive suspension of 20, 111, 116, 178n. 23 attentive watching 111 aura 8, 50, 51, 88 aural / aurality 29,31–32, 35, 53–54, 61, 117, 121, 129, 131, 137 autobiography 66, 74 ayah 82, 113, 163n. 96 Badiou, Alain 24 Balkans 108, 170n. 72, 170n. 73 Barbour, Douglas 25

Index Barthes, Roland 104, 154n. 58 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 8 becoming 17, 25, 29, 75, 122, 128 art of 32 becoming-landscape 105, 106 becoming-minor 23, 24, 149n. 95 becoming-political 94 becoming-soporific 111 micropolitics of 23, 25 behaviorism 13 Benjamin, Walter 8, 21, 100, 105 Bennett, Jill 15–16 Bersani, Leo 16 Bignall, Simone 95 binary 7, 23–26, 90, 93, 111, 121, 122, 125, 140 Binoche, Juliette 129 binocular disparity 100 biography 31, 35, 53, 65, 66, 70, 74, 133, 160n. 53 hapticized 34 biopower 23 Bluestone, George 126 Bodhisattvas 87 Bolduc, David 140–41 Bongie, Chris 93 bpNichol 34, 56–59, 157n. 110 Braidotti, Rosi 24–25, 82 Buddha 92, 163n. 100 statues of 80, 81, 85, 87, 91 gaze of 87, 91, 92 image of 87 Buddhism 86, 164n. 125 Protestant 164n. 125 Sinhala 67, 160n. 45, 161n. 67, 163n. 100, 164n. 125 syncretic 87, 164n. 124, 164n. 128 Theravāda 164n. 124 Burgher 73, 76, 79, 161n. 67 Burns, Walter Noble 43, 153n. 19, 154n. 33 Callard, Felicity 21 Canada 1, 25–27, 35, 43, 56–57, 59, 67, 71, 76, 96–97, 103–5, 107–10, 115, 122, 124, 126, 129, 156n. 107 Canadian mosaic 97, 99, 109, 170n. 74 Canadianness 35, 102

199

and immigration 168n. 44 history 96 World Literacy Canada 141 writing 26 See also multiculturalism capitalism 21, 24, 82, 95, 102, 103, 107, 111, carnivalesque 71 Cartesian 4, 68 anti-Cartesian drive 8 eye 8 optical control 29 Carry on Crime and Punishment 11, 27, 56 cartography 73, 76, 116, 118, 119, 128, 160n. 56 Caruth, Cathy 17, 63 catharsis 6, 15, 16, 22, 23, 66, 91 emotional 138 Ceylon 11, 65, 72–76, 78–79 See also colonial, postcolonial, Sri Lanka Charterhouse of Parma, The 112 Cheek to Cheek 131 Christianity 6, 86, 117, 120, 164n. 125, 174n. 141 cinema/cinematic 11–12, 27, 29, 31, 34–35, 39–43, 47–49, 55, 56–62, 98, 108, 125–32 aesthetics 126, 128 cross-cutting 115 cuts 2, 43, 47, 48, 59, 61, 115, 121, 124, 127, 131, 132 dissolves 73, 124, 127, 128, 131 haptic/hapticization 30–31, 130 image 39–40 intercultural 8 metaphor 2 narrative 2 popular 31 shots aerial shot 127, 128, 132 long shot 128, 130, 132 medium shot 132 over-the-shoulder shot 47 point-of-view shot 130 silent 102 techniques 39–43, 47, 49, 55, 129 “Cinnamon Peeler, The” 77–8

200

Index

Clinton Special, The 12, 27, 34, 56–57, 59–62, 136 close-up cinematic 59, 127–28, 129, 130, 136 literary 11, 32, 36, 38, 68, 70, 78, 80, 81, 89, 97, 115 photographic 41, 43 cognition/cognitive 3, 5, 11, 13- 15, 17, 19, 28, 31, 49, 50, 53, 64, 68, 69, 95, 98, 105, 119, 127, 138, 145n. 40, 146n. 41, 147n. 53 and ideology 22 supremacy 95 suspension of 20, 178n. 23 and trauma 64, 159n. 37 withholding of 17 Colette 134, 137 Collected Works of Billy the Kid, The 11–12, 32–44, 47, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 72, 112, 136, 153n. 31, 154n. 33, 154n. 39, 167n. 31 colonial 2, 21, 73, 79, 86, 122, 123, 125, 130 anti-colonial 93 assimilation 73 Ceylon 65, 73, 78, 161n. 67 discourse 78 colonial (continued) history 73, 74 imagination 72 mimicry 73, 174n. 148 neocolonial 2, 24, 95 power 119, 120 practices 1, 78, 117 rhetoric 82, 129 subject 123, 129 Coming through Slaughter 5, 10, 11, 12, 19, 27, 31, 32, 44–55, 58, 59, 61, 67, 72, 136, 155n. 61, 155n. 70 concrete poetry 31, 34, 56, 58, 59 control authorial/narrative 10, 22, 42, 46, 60, 102, 115, 117, 131, 135, 156n. 106, 163n. 120 epistemological 21, 88, 109 of one’s own body 14, 102, 117, 139 of others’ bodies 88, 102, 107, 114, 172n. 108

optical 9, 29, 34, 36, 60, 71, 91, 105, 117, 129, 130, 135 political/institutional 21, 24, 88, 95, 102, 111, 123, 124, 129, 130 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 87, 164n. 128 Cooper, James Fenimore 113 corporeality/the corporeal 3, 6, 7, 13, 17, 20, 21, 22, 27, 37, 38, 65, 68, 69, 76, 81, 83, 87, 88, 98, 107, 110, 116, 117, 119, 121, 128, 138 agency of 96 denigration /abuse of 22, 86, 88, 137, 165n. 135 depersonified 119 incorporeal awareness 9 inscriptions 88 inscrutable 138 instrumentalization of 50, 69, 82, 97, 107, 116, 128 intercorporeality 5, 7, 11 irreducibility of 26 objectification of 54, 81, 107 pleasures 107 politics and 106 regulation of 106, 107 transgressive 129 unreadable 98 vulnerability of 18, 26 witnessing and 89–91, 165n. 134, 165n. 135 cosmopolitanism 121 Crary, Jonathan 100, 111, 173n. 124 Cūlavamsa, The 83, 163n. 100 culture industries 2, 3, 13, 92, 102, 103, 148n. 82 cynicism 1, 22, 80, 96, 111, 114, 120, 124–25, 139, 172n. 108 Dafoe, Willem 129 Davey, Frank 26 David with the Head of Goliath 125, 175n. 156 deconstruction 24, 25 defamiliarization 60, 109 Deleuze, Gilles 8, 12–14, 17, 23–6, 29, 31, 39, 48, 52, 75–79, 94–95, 111, 127, 149n. 93, 149n. 95, 150n. 99 demarcation of identity 99, 105, 129

Index of images 128, 131 of reality and representation 22, 25 of sound 131 of territory 116 Derrida, Jacques 117, 144n. 17, 173n. 121 desert 98, 112–13, 116, 118–19, 121, 124, 127–28, 129, 131, 132 deterritorialization 8 dhobi women 83 dialectic 32, 66, 94, 135 dialectical subsumption 4 haptic/optical 10 non-dialectical 95 diaspora 66 diegetic 2, 52, 56, 102, 103, 104, 140 extradiegetic 56, 103 dissolution of authorial voice 178n. 23 of optical distance 39 of perceptual regimes 32 of reader, character, narrator 34, 49 of self and other 49 See also subject Divisadero 11, 28, 133–40, 177n. 2, 178n. 23, 179n. 38, 179n. 42, 179n. 46 documentary 34, 56–61, 136 theater 59, 157n. 115 Dumas 137, 139 Dutch (nationality/ethnicity) 8, 72, 73 editing 48, 56–59, 71, 137 Eisenstein, Sergei 126 Eliot, T.S. 2 emotion 3, 5, 8, 13, 14, 20, 50, 145n. 40, 146n. 48, 147n. 53, 159n. 37 sublimated 91 empathy 12, 17, 39, 85, 139 empathic unsettlement 16 empire 24, 95 European 122, 174n. 140 Habsburg 174nn. 140–41 empiricism/empiricist 6, 7, 22, 30, 83 English/Englishness language 10, 71, 77, 104, 107, 109, 128 nationality/identity 72, 73, 121, 123, 124

201

English Patient, The (book) 11, 27, 82, 96–98, 112–25, 134, 136, 155n. 83, 173n. 138, 174n. 146, 175n. 156, 175n. 158 English Patient, The (film) 27, 98, 125–32, 145n. 36, 156n. 106, 176nn. 167–70 Enlightenment 6, 7, 13 Epic of Gilgamesh, The 106, 169n. 63 epistemology/epistemological 17, 25,29, 30, 33, 54, 57, 63, 64, 95, 98, 115, 116, 134, 136, 138, 140 crisis in 28, 147n. 68 epistemological tool 68 identitarian 115, 124 limits 67 normative 95 slippage 88 tactile 20, 30, 89, 113 uncertainty/ambivalence 12, 20, 32, 34, 63, 89, 108 ethics 6, 7, 16, 22, 101, 107 and affect 5, 15, 16, 34 and the haptic 4, 11, 12, 20, 27, 56, 66, 67, 95, 98, 127, 136, 138, 140 and history 79 and otherness 11, 20, 67, 95, 136, 139 transitorial 126 and vulnerability 136 and witness writing 20, 27, 64, 66, 84, 89, 98 ethology 14, 28 Eurocentrism 24, 26, 76, 78, 124 fabulation 75, 80, 94 family 65, 66, 70, 71, 74–6, 79, 85, 98, 103, 118, 120, 123, 124, 138 gaze 71 history 59, 69, 72–75 hapticized narratives 77 idiosyncratic 96 “the lived reality of” 71 looking 71 “the myth of the ideal” 71 and nation 71, 118, 123 photographs 12, 59, 158n. 17

202

Index

Farm Show, The 59 feeling 3, 6, 13, 14, 65, 105, 111, 113, 117, 147n. 53, 159n. 37 of empathy 12, 159n. 38 of humiliation 138 of loss 110 of pain 69 of patriotism 123 Felman, Shoshana 17, 63–64 feminism 6, 7, 25 fidelity criticism 125, 126, 175n. 159 Fiennes, Ralph 129 filiative 27, 69 Finnish (nationality/ethnicity) 103, 110 flashback 127 flashforward 127 Foucault, Michel 23, 88, 165n. 134, 165n. 35 framing cinematic in The Collected Works 42 in The Clinton Special 57, 59, 61–62 in The English Patient 130, 132 photographic in The Collected Works 34, 35, 39, 40, 43, 44, 67 in Running in the Family 71 Freud, Sigmund 6 Gandelman, Claude 21, 58 Garrett-Petts, Will 32, 35, 139 gaze 2, 3, 36, 42, 49, 76, 80, 85, 91, 101, 144n. 25, 178n. 23 blind gaze 110 of the Buddha 87, 91 colonial 78, 126 of History 43, 49, 50 identitarian 130 male 7, 177n. 174 narrator’s 46, 134 omniscient 116 optical 10, 34, 85, 112, 137–38 patriarchal 7 reader’s 3 rogue gaze 119–20 spectatorial 51 Western 2, 86 genealogy 66, 69, 75, 96, 122

German (nationality/ethnicity) 119, 121, 122, 124, 129, 174n. 141, 176n. 170 gitan 134 glance 104, 110, 115, 130, 136 Glissant, Édouard 24–25 Gombrich, Ernst 21 Griffith, D. W. 126 grope 112, 118 Guattari, Félix 8, 23–26, 75–79, 94–95, 111, 149n. 95, 150n. 99 Hallward, Peter 93 hands 36–37, 83, 116–18, 173n. 120, 173n. 21 Handwriting 140, 141, 179n. 49 haptic 4–9, 11–12, 18, 21, 26–28, 32, 34, 38–40, 54, 63, 91, 95–96, 98, 136–39, 142n. 6 aesthetics 4, 11, 17, 26–8, 56–7, 62, 95, 98, 138 art 32, 33, 52, 54–5, 60, 136 artist 43 eye 8, 36, 119 hearing 53 image 9, 39 look 24, 95, 115–16 map 57 object 39 observed 10 observer 9 optical/haptic dialectic 10 proximity 89 reader/reading 31, 36–9, 43–44, 46 rendition 46 vision 8, 53 visuality 9, 17, 30, 40 witness writing 27, 63–9, 77–80, 89–93 writing 18, 20, 27–8, 33–34, 434–4, 56, 64, 95–96, 98, 127, 136, 138 hapticity 8, 9, 33, 53, 55, 90, 138 aural 53 and film 29, 30, 31 and history 41 , 77, 101, 113–14 and ideology 21 and photography 40, 50–2 and politics 28, 95–98, 120

Index hapticization 10, 28, 34, 36, 41, 50–2, 54, 101, 113–14, 121, 129–30, 136 Hardt, Michael 24, 93, 95, 111 Harraway, Donna 111 Heble, Ajay 74 Hiroshima and Nagasaki 115, 121, 123–24, 125 Hirsch, Marianne 17, 64, 71 An Historical Relation of Ceylon 79, 160n. 56, 162n. 80 Histories, The 112, 113 historiography 1, 28, 33, 34, 41, 43, 49, 64–66, 68, 97 communal 119 official 27, 76 See also micropolitics, multisensory Howes, David 21 Hsu, Hsuan 126 Huffman, L.A. 40–44, 46, 52, 153n. 31, 154n. 39 Hungary 113, 121, 122, 124, 131, 172n. 96, 173n. 139, 174n. 141, 176n. 168 Hutcheon, Linda 65 hybridity 95 hyperesthesia 6, 21 hypersensuality 21 identitarian 49, 67, 86–87, 94–95, 98, 105, 114–15, 118–20, 128 anti-identitarian 24 being 25 binarism 26 discourse 28, 86, 89 epistemologies 115, 124 (re)inscriptions 83, 98, 124, 140 non-identitarian 17, 32, 118, 124 politics 23, 27, 73, 94, 127 thought 39, 93, 120, 123 identitarianism 24, 26, 68, 82, 92, 96, 121, 124, 129 post-identitarianism 24 See also oppositional identity politics 74, 86, 96 ideology 4, 21, 22, 28, 71, 75, 88, 97, 114, 124, 140 See also affect, cognition, hapticity, nation, oppositional, power

203

immigrants / immigration 12, 96, 97, 99–110, 168n. 44 imperialist 1, 120, 121 In the Skin of a Lion 11, 12, 26, 27, 52, 67, 96–97, 99–111, 112, 120, 122, 134, 136, 138, 167n. 31, 169n. 62, 169n. 64, 169n. 70, 171n. 84, 171n. 86 in-betweenness 14, 25, 66 incommensurability 7, 63 See also language index/ the indexical 29, 31, 42, 59, 64, 67, 68, 77, 79, 88, 112, 138, 140, 167n. 30 indexicality 73, 87, 95, 135, 139 instrumentalization of the aesthetic 22, 104, 169n. 56 See also corporeal intersensoriality 7, 8 interstitiality 66 intersubjectivity 3, 4, 7, 14, 15, 16, 20, 29, 139, 146n. 48 intertextuality 25, 31, 56 invisibility 88, 123–24 Irigaray, Luce 7 irredentism 122 irreducibility of difference 63, 110, 138, 140 Italian campaign 115, 124 James, William 13 Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP) 70, 81, 160n. 45 Jones, Gail 139, 179n. 48 Kanaganayakam, Chelva 26 Kant, Immanuel 22 Kaplan, Caren 24, 149n. 95 Kim 112 kinesthetic 6, 32, 104, 142n. 4 Kipling, Rudyard 112, 123, 128, 129 Knox, Robert 79, 160n. 56, 162n. 80 Kristeva, Julia 54 kynical 96 LaCapra, Dominick 16 language 19, 45, 68, 73, 77, 79, 94, 102–5, 110 body/gestural 82, 103, 109

204

Index

language (continued) incommensurability of 17, 63 materiality of 56, 58, 79 opacity of 79, 109 power and 71, 102–6, 108, 139, 161n. 59, 161n. 67 processual 17, 64 reinvention of 129 testimonial power of 17, 64 transparency of 25, 56, 76 verbal 20, 56, 102 Last of the Mohicans, The 113 Laub, Dori 66, 147n. 68 liberal democracy 95 liminality 23, 35, 56, 61 of art 58, 59 of history 75 of identity 122 listening 65, 99, 113 attentive 65 embodied 113 empathic 159n. 38 misguided 65 tentative 99 Lyotard, Jean-François 21, 63 Macedonia 97, 99, 104, 106–10, 170n. 73 macropolitics 27–28, 68–69, 84–85, 94, 96–8, 111, 120, 122, 125, 140–41 identitarian 127 maps/mapping alternative 35, 41, 44, 45, 57, 65, 74, 75, 76, 78, 114, 116, 126, 129, 136, 139, 140, 162 of the body 78, 114, 129 in cinema 126, 127 film as 57 of a life 35, 41, 44, 45, 65, 74 of memory 140 of territory 11, 18, 71–73, 76, 85–86, 96, 98, 103, 112, 113, 116, 118, 128, 129, 160n. 56, 176n. 163 writing as 65, 136, 139 See also haptic, olfactory, optical, rhizome, tactile Marks, Laura 8, 10, 29–31, 33, 38–40, 52–3, 89–90

Marseillaise 115 Marxist criticism 21, 22, 24, 93, 107 McFarlane, Brian 127 McLuhan, Marshall 8, 58 memoir 19, 59, 66, 67, 69, 71, 74, 75 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 8, 144n. 17 meta-comments 58 metafiction 10, 12, 18, 42, 129, 131 metalinguistic 45 meta-meaning 45, 53 meta-narrative 17 metaphysics 4, 22, 137 micropolitics 4, 23–28, 33, 89, 90, 93–98, 102, 105, 107, 111, 120, 122, 123, 127, 143n. 7 art 27, 34, 140 historiography 33 re-vision 125 writing 96 migrant 68 Miller, Christopher 24 mimesis 4, 16,, 60, 136 Minghella, Anthony 27, 98, 125, 126, 127, 129, 131 minor art 24 miscegenation 73, 74 mise en abyme 127 Misérables, Les 133, 135 mixed-media 11, 18, 31, 136, 139, 178n. 26 modernism 6, 11, 24, 26, 33 mongrel 71, 74, 105 montage 41, 57, 61, 82, 127, 131 continuity 60 literary 124 movement-image 29, 31, 46 Mukherjee, Arun 26 multiculturalism 106, 108, 170n. 74 See also Canada multisensory 11, 20, 46, 78, 121, 128, 136 aesthetic strategies 96 and the haptic 8, 28, 32, 64, 95, 96, 136, 137 historiographies 97 image 44, 121, 130 photographs 51 reading 5, 10, 11, 32, 35 romanticization of 28

Index sight 111 televisual experience 8 vision 30 writing 4, 32, 33, 44, 127 Murch, Walter 125 mystification 4, 21, 22, 24, 68 naming of people 43, 47, 50, 53, 66–67, 72–73, 80, 83, 96, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 113, 115, 116, 119, 128, 129, 174n. 146 of places 72–73, 76, 86, 108, 116, 118–19, 128, 133 nation 26, 57, 66, 71, 76, 79, 84, 87, 94, 98, 118, 121, 124, 128, 131 anti-nationalist 121, 124 nationalisme agressif 87 nationalisme amoureux 87 nationalist ideology 74, 87, 96, 98, 116, 122, 123, 163n. 100, 164n. 125, 164n. 125 nationless 121, 124, 129 nation-states 27, 73, 87, 95, 122, 124, 161n. 67 post-national 98, 118, 120 Negri, Antonio 24, 93, 95, 111 Nētra Mangala 87, 91–92, 164n. 128 Nietzsche, Friedrich 13 nomadology 24 object 4, 6, 8, 9, 14, 16, 22, 29, 30, 89, 91, 107, 126, 136 objectification 5, 52, 54, 81, 86, 90, 103, 107, 108 unobjectifiable 69, 129 See also haptic, optical objective correlative 2 ocularcentrism 2, 8, 101 Oderic 72, 76 Ohrid 108 olfactory 78, 82, 107, 116, 121 identity 106 mapping 78, 116 subversion 78 See also smell oneiric 71, 76 ontology 52, 98 relational 14, 137

205

opacity 17, 20, 22, 27, 32, 50, 58, 61, 62, 69, 73, 77, 83, 95, 97, 102, 107, 109, 114, 137, 139, 140, 141 of alterity 15, 16, 43, 102, 138 of being 5, 19, 27, 35, 70, 89, 96, 101 of the body 85 of difference 20, 115, 140 in History 50 of language 79 and micropolitics 127 of representation 59 oppositional identitarianism 96 ideology 97 monologic discourses 26 politics 93, 111 optical 9, 10, 18, 30, 31, 34, 38, 39, 49, 53, 76, 89, 95, 100, 121, 130, 135, 139 art 55 cliché 39 control 9, 29, 34, 36, 60, 91, 92, 117, 129 discourse 18, 19, 33 distance 37 epistemologies 32, 127 eye 8, 50, 52, 130 image 9, 35 knowledge 11, 46, 55, 116 map 76 object 9 reader/reading 38, 39, 43, 48, 51 representation 19, 20, 33, 36, 40, 41, 43, 44, 46, 51, 52, 54, 83, 86 subject /self 9, 21, 49 transparency 20 visuality 8, 9, 30, 40, 53 witnessing 88, 89 opticity 9, 18, 50, 53, 71, 116, 137 and film 39, 40 and history 44, 102 and politics 21, 89, 119, 120 opticization 51 Orientalist accounts 71, 76 otherness 11, 15, 20, 21, 67, 97, 99, 121, 129, 139, 173n. 139 Ottoman Empire 122, 170n. 73, 174nn. 140–41

206

Index

Pallasmaa, Juhani 8 Papoulias, Constantina 21 parody 26, 72, 73, 74 Pelmanism 117–18, 119, 120 Penner, Tom 98 phenomenology 4, 6, 7, 8, 28, 64, 77 See also subject photography 11, 12, 18, 31, 33–35, 38, 40–44, 46–55, 57, 59, 62, 67, 70–71, 78–80, 84, 99–101, 106, 102, 137, 153n. 31, 154n. 33, 154n. 39, 154n. 54, 155n. 70 pigeonnier 135 Plato 6, 16, 22 poetics of Relation 24 postcolonial 21, 24, 94, 121 critique 26, 93, 126, 127 in-betweenness 25 literature 94, 161n. 59, 162n. 84 nation-state 73 sensualism 6 Sri Lanka 20, 161n. 67 studies 7, 93 theory 8, 93 trauma 159n. 38 postmodernism 6, 24, 25,137, 140 power of art/stories/film 3, 29, 72, 81 of the body 69, 87, 89 disempowerment 68, 80, 85, 88, 91, 99, 103, 104, 106, 111 dynamic between people 129–31, 138 empowerment 4, 9, 24, 28, 30, 33, 51, 87, 89, 102, 104, 106, hegemonic 11, 21, 22, 73, 87, 88, 106, 110, 172n. 108 of ideology 22 of the reader 33 symbolical power 68 of vision 89 of visual subjectification 30 See also affect, colonial, biopower, ideology, language, testimony precipitate 117, 119, 173n. 121 propinquity 113, 114, 115, 119, 124, 137 proprioceptive 6, 142n. 4 proximity 6, 11, 32, 33, 78, 136

and difference 125 and distance (dialectics of) 21–22, 66, 91, 135 in film 34, 57, 127 and the haptic 32–33, 89, 95 and indexicality 87 and micropolitics 127 and photography 40 proximal reader 36 and vision 100 and witnessing 17–18, 27, 64–66, 68, 70, 74–75, 140 Protevi, John 14 Punjab 124, 163n. 96 queer studies 6 reader 5, 10, 11, 13, 27, 28, 31, 34, 38, 47, 49, 50, 56, 58, 70, 129, 136–38 See also dissolution, gaze, haptic, optical, power, proximity, witness relationality 90, 91, 113, 124, 125, 136 See also affect relics 87 reterritorialization 98 rhizome 35, 37, 40 rhizomatic map 75, 76, 162n. 69 Riegl, Aloïs 8 Roberts, Gillian 125 Running in the Family 11, 12, 19, 27, 59, 65–67, 69–80, 81, 83, 86, 109, 136, 138, 158n. 17, 160n. 53, 160n. 56 Scarry, Elaine 15, 68–69, 81, 85 scopic 6, 7 consumption 83 economy 89 regime 78 script Cyrillic 109 Latin 109 Sinhala 77, 79 sense 2, 4–8, 10, 30, 31, 55, 65, 79, 143n. 10, 143n. 12 of agentlessness 68 of belonging 120 distant 105 of entrapment 86

Index ethical sense of being 6 of fear 54 of intimacy 20, 116, 120 modalities 18, 58 of multiplicity 73 of opaque liminality 59 of order and clarity 120 of paradox 18 of physicality 68, 130 proximal senses 116, 121 of shared materiality 59 of smell 116 of tactile experience/exploration 37, 77 of taste 79, 106, 116 of touch 116, 143n. 16, 144n. 17, 173n. 120 sense (continued) of understanding 70 of unsettlement 15 of vision 100, 111, 142n. 2, 144n. 17, 173n. 124 of vulnerability 32, 34 sensorial autonomy 7 sensorium 6, 9, 30, 32, 35, 58 sensual abandon 30 Serres, Michel 6, 7 sight eyesight 2, 6, 64, 87, 91, 111, 112, 138, 139, 143n. 16 of a rifle 119 Sigiri/Sigiriya 78, 83 Silva, Neluka 74, 139 Simondon, Gilbert 14 Sims, Peter 51 singularity 5, 16, 24, 50, 51, 84, 85, 87, 152n. 15 Sinhala, Sinhalese 72, 73, 77, 79, 83, 86, 109 Sinhala Buddhism 67, 161n. 67, 163n. 100, 164n. 124, 164n. 125 smell 65, 76, 78, 82, 105, 106, 107, 112, 116, 117, 121, 162n. 80 and colonization 78 See also olfactory social constructivism 6 Solecki, Sam 25, 56 soma 13, 142n. 4, 145n. 40, 146n. 49 somatic 2, 3, 7, 13

207

psycho-somatic 15 sonographs 11, 44–46, 52–53, 137 Sons of Captain Poetry 11, 27, 34, 56–9, 60, 136, 156n. 109 soundscape 128–31 soundtrack 127, 129, 130 131 Spinoza, Baruch 14 Sri Lanka 1, 3, 11, 26–27, 65–69, 71–72, 75–78, 80–82, 85–86, 90, 161n. 67, 163n. 100, 164n. 125, 164n. 128 stereoscopic 100–2 images 100, 101 perception 101 versions of a character 179n. 38 vision 68, 100, 139 Story, The 11, 28, 140–41 storytelling 8, 35, 59, 67, 74, 99–100, 106, 112, 118, 137, 158n. 18, 167n. 30 subject 4, 9, 13, 14, 15, 22, 24, 25, 26, 30, 36, 55, 58, 65, 73, 89, 95, 111, 128, 137 boundaries of 4,6, 8, 14, 76, 136 desubjectification 15, 118 dissolution of 15, 163n. 120 enlightened 22, 30 phenomenological 4 subjectification 30, 111, 129 subjective intentionality 4 subjective interiority 12, 173n. 124 unitary/uniform subject 64, 91, 94 Western 3 sublimation 15, 16, 22, 54, 66, 91, 123, 163n. 120 synesthesia 6, 14, 44, 67, 139 Romantic 6 Szerelem, Szerelem 128, 131 Tadié, Alexis 10 Tamil 72, 73, 86, 161n. 67 taste 44, 79, 106, 116, 162n. 80 in cinema 130 Testa, Bart 57 testimony 17–18, 39, 40, 53, 63–66, 69, 74–77, 90, 147n. 68 accounts 17, 18, 59, 64, 67, 75–76 act 66, 70 function 27, 64

208

Index

testimony (continued) imperative 64 narrative 65 power 64 task 61 Theatre Passe Muraille 59–60, 62 Thoburn, Nicholas 23 Thomas, Bronwen 129, 175n. 162 Thompson, Paul 59–61 time-image 29, 31, 46, 51, 52, 59, 127 Tomkins, Silvan 13 Toronto 12, 59, 60, 96, 99, 100, 102, 104, 108, 170n. 73 touch 3, 5–8, 12- 13, 37, 53, 67, 69, 76, 78, 79, 82, 90, 111, 114, 116, 117, 130, 143n. 16, 144n. 17, 144n. 18, 173n. 120 transcription 73, 79, 109–10, 134 translation 45, 72, 73, 77, 78, 83, 109, 110, 123, 127 audio-typographical 76 blind 117 cultural 109, 110 empirical 81 metalinguistic 45 tactile 55, 116 untranslated words 79, 138, 162n. 84 verbal 47, 50, 72, 85, 137 transliteration 109–10 trauma 14–15, 65, 134 bearing witness to 17 representation of 15, 17

Waldman, Nell 25 Wang Wang Blues 131 war 1, 11, 16, 23, 65, 68, 70, 79, 80–92, 112–25, 128, 137, 139, 164n. 122, 169n. 56, 170n. 73 Great War 137, 139, 170n. 73, 172n. 96 Gulf War 137 Second World War 70, 97, 118, 125 Wikkramasinha, Lakdasa 77, 78 witness 17–20, 27–29, 35, 43, 54, 63–70, 77, 81–92, 138 affectionate 68, 89–90 aural 54 bearing witness 17–18, 20, 63–70, 74–78, 81–92, 96, 98, 115, 117, 134, 140 belated 63, 79, 90 the body witnessing 69, 80, 89–92, 165n. 135 reader as 66 witnessing the body 68, 81–88, 165n. 135 witnessing oneself witness 18, 27, 68 witnessing the witness 27, 64–66, 74, 90, 147n. 68 witness writing 18, 20, 27, 63, 66–70, 75, 138 “Women Like You” 78 Wood, Nancy 87 working through 91 Wuthnow, Julie 24

unbelonging 74

Yared, Gabriel 131 Young, Iris 7

villanelle 135 visceral 2, 6, 8, 41, 54 memorialization 11 visibility 69, 86, 89, 98, 123–24

Zaentz, Saul 125 Zepetnek, Steven de 121, 173n. 138, 173n. 139 Žižek, Slavoj 21–24