Caring for Community

Towards a New Ethics of Responsibility in Contemporary Postcolonial Novels

Marijke Denger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429884856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Caring for Community: Towards a New Ethics of Responsibility in Contemporary Postcolonial Novels focuses on four highly acclaimed publications in order to argue for a new understanding of community and its ethical framework in recent literary texts. Traditionally, community has been understood to function on the basis of individuals' readiness to establish relationships of reciprocal responsibility. This book, however, argues that community and non-reciprocity need not be mutually exclusive categories. Examining works by leading contemporary postcolonial authors and reading them against Judith Butler's post-9/11 concept of global political community, the book explores how concrete acts of responsibility can be carried out in recognition of various others, even and precisely when those others cannot be expected to respond. The literary analyses draw on a rich theoretical framework that includes approaches to care, hospitality and the ethical encounter between self and other. Overall, this book establishes that the novels' protagonists, by investing in an ethics of responsibility that does not require reciprocity, acquire the agency to envisage new forms of community. By reflecting on the nature and effect of this agency and its representation in contemporary literary texts, the book also considers the role of postcolonial studies in addressing highly topical questions regarding our co-existence with others.

1
Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient

From a Crumbling Villa to a Porous Community

Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning The English Patient (1992) occupies a special position in relation to Aslam’s, de Kretser’s and Law-Yone’s respective texts. For one thing, it is the oldest novel of the four and, undoubtedly, the one that has engendered the largest amount of previous critical research. What is more, The English Patient presents us with a particular way of approaching community that sets it apart from the other novels discussed in this book. Specifically, the Tuscan Villa San Girolamo, which is the main focus of analysis here, provides the setting for a three-step process of investing in and envisaging new ways of dealing with others. It is due to this setting that the narrative of the Canadians Hana and Caravaggio, the Indian Kip and the possibly English patient can give rise to a new approach to community, responsibility and reciprocity. Including individuals from different parts of a British Empire on the brink of dissolution, and revolving around a character who is associated with—but also defies the principles of—imperialist expansion, the community represented in The English Patient is firmly situated within a postcolonial context. As such, it forms the background against which the relationships established in the later novels, all of which feature individuals with hybrid cultural affiliations, will be analysed. Although the community surrounding the patient falls apart following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it has lasting significance—both for some of the characters represented in The English Patient and for the line of argumentation pursued throughout the following chapters. San Girolamo’s community makes way for a tie of mutual trust and affection, established between Hana and Kip, which does not require the (immediate) reciprocation of responsibility in order to impact on the individuals engaged in a relationship with each other. It is such a tie that allows us to consider the conditions under which a new ethics of responsibility can come into being and that will prove unrealisable in The Wasted Vigil.

From the (Marginal) Desert to (Liminal) Tuscany

The English Patient opens at the end of the Second World War, in the dilapidated and dangerous Villa San Girolamo, located in the hills north of Florence. San Girolamo and its immediate environment have been profoundly shaped by the recently concluded Second World War:

[The] Italian hill town […] had been besieged for more than a month, the barrage focusing upon the two villas and the monastery surrounded by apple and plum orchards. There was the Villa Medici, where the generals lived. Just above it the Villa San Girolamo, previously a nunnery, whose castlelike battlements had made it the last stronghold of the German army. […] Sections of the chapel were blown up. Parts of the top storey of the villa crumbled under explosions. When the Allies finally took over the building and made it a hospital, the steps leading to the third level were sealed off, though a section of chimney and roof survived. […] [Now,] [f]rom outside, the place seemed devastated.

(EP 12–14)

Over the centuries, San Girolamo has held different functions for the various communities that have made use of its infrastructure. As its battlements, chapel and orchards evidence, the villa has always played a central role in the social structures formed in relation to it. However, San Girolamo’s current desolation has caused its removal from any regularised form of social life. The villa can only be reached by passing “[d]ead cattle” and “[p]eople hanging upside down from bridges” (EP 29). Mine-infested and falling apart, it is not just “[c]ompletely unsafe”, but downright “terrible” (EP 29). At first sight, San Girolamo is a marginal location, a setting characterised by perilous stasis—or even regression—which offers no possibility whatsoever for individual or collective development. However, it is precisely due to its secluded and dangerous state that the villa signals protection to Hana.

For Hana, “twenty years old and mad and unconcerned with safety” (EP 13), San Girolamo is such an appealing environment because it suggests removal from the kind of large-scale human conflict that caused the villa’s and her own ruination. Having witnessed profound suffering in her profession as a military nurse, and shell-shocked following the death of her father, her lover and her unborn child, Hana seeks to withdraw from social structure by abandoning her medical corps and remaining behind in San Girolamo. Here, she can restrict her interaction with others to the act of caring for “the one burned man they called ‘the English patient’” (EP 51):

Coming out of what had happened to her during the war, [Hana] drew her own few rules to herself. She would not be ordered again or carry out duties for the greater good. She would care only for the burned patient. She would read to him and bathe him and give him his doses of morphine—her only communication was with him.

(EP 14)

With her decision not to join her fellow nurses, the doctors and their charges on their way to the comparative safety of northern Italy, Hana to a certain extent succeeds in turning her back on the world and her role in it. However, as the sole caretaker of a derelict building and the sole carer for a ravaged individual, Hana, by remaining in San Girolamo, takes on the kind of burden of which she desires to be relieved. Apparently, although the villa has been assigned to the margins of organised human coexistence, those who retreat to its environment are not necessarily barred from investing in their surroundings in a potentially productive way.

Considering that it is at once profoundly shaped by its previous involvement in and defined by its current removal from social structure, Villa San Girolamo can be said to display liminal attributes. However, there is more to the villa’s creative potential than its geographical location and material condition. In order to understand the wider consequences of Hana’s paradoxical attempt to shed her previous responsibilities by taking up a vast amount of responsibility, we must consider in more detail the character who is, initially, her sole interlocutor: the patient, who requires Hana’s medical attention because he “fell burning into the desert” (EP 5). Shot down in his plane during the war, the patient was rescued by Bedouin and brought to the British Army base at the Siwa oasis in Egypt. From there, he was shipped to Italy and ended up in Villa San Girolamo, where he still claims to be unable to remember his name and provenance. Although his manners and diction cause him to appear English, in the course of the novel, the patient is with some certainty identified as the Hungarian Count Ladislaus de Almásy—at least to the extent that the fragmented history related by the patient is that of said historical explorer-cartographer who may or may not have been a Nazi collaborator.¹ Throughout this chapter, I use the denomination ‘patient’ to refer to the burned man who recounts a personal history to Hana. The denomination ‘Almásy’ refers to the main character of that history. Although they might well be one and the same character, the distinction between the patient and Almásy is significant for my analysis of the development of Almásy’s unproductive marginality in the Libyan Desert to the patient’s productive liminality in San Girolamo.²

Burnt beyond recognition, the patient’s body has been branded by his involvement in the war. At the same time, the narrative he shares with his nurse speaks of continuous efforts to be rid of any kind of responsibility towards others. At first sight, Almásy’s simultaneous inclusion in and (desired) distance from social structure endows him with similar qualities as those to be found in the environment in which the patient is slowly dying. This would suggest that San Girolamo’s liminal characteristics are further emphasised by Almásy’s narrative, as told by the patient. However, throughout the patient’s mental excursions into Almásy’s personal history and its appertaining geopolitical, literary and artistic references, it transpires that the situation is reversed. Almásy’s paradoxical stance on social structure is not a marker of liminality. Rather, the cartographer’s dislike of social structure is inspired by egoistic motives and, therefore, a dead end. By contrast, the character of the patient supports Hana’s eventual appropriation of the creative potential inherent in her surroundings.

According to the patient’s meandering memories, Almásy spent most of the interwar years “mapping the greater part of the Gilf Kebir plateau, looking for the lost oasis that was called Zerzura” (EP 135). While his Hungarian nationality associates him with a multi-ethnic melting pot,³ his profession of choice physically places the desert explorer, cartographer and pilot Almásy in between different elusive natural environments. As the patient tells Hana, Almásy’s investment in the literally boundless spaces that are the sky and the desert reinforced his desire to negate national borders:

Gradually [I] became nationless. I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states. […] [I] disappeared into landscape. […] I wanted to erase my name and the place I had come from. By the time war arrived, after ten years in the desert, it was easy for me to slip across borders, not to belong to anyone, to any nation.

(EP 138–9)

For several reasons, the final statement of this quotation is problematic. For one thing, at this point in the narrative, Almásy’s disastrous relationship with Katharine Clifton and his supposedly inadvertent embroilment in the war are about to evidence the unrealistic nature of his existence outside of any national or social structure. More immediately, Almásy’s passion for “mapping and re-exploring” contrasts with his aversion to institutionalised forms of belonging (EP 136). After all, the act of capturing and defining one’s environment on paper is akin to the possessive aspect of nationalism that Almásy so despises. Furthermore, it is highly questionable whether the desert that Almásy associates with a liberating form of non-belonging really is untainted by geopolitical interests. The patient (implicitly) refers to both of these issues when reminiscing about the desire of Almásy’s companions to claim parts of the desert for their own glory. Distancing himself from this practice, the patient speaks of “[s]mall vanities in this plot of land northwest of the Sudan, south of Cyrenaica” (EP 139), thereby accurately inserting a supposed no-man’s-land into a long history of imperialism.⁴ Clearly, the idea of disappearing into landscape and thereby securing an existence outside of any kind of social, political or communal context is illusory.

In order to get at the crux of Almásy’s self-proclaimed exclusion from social structure, it is important to take into account his love affair with Katharine, the wife of the young British explorer (and, as it later turns out, spy) Geoffrey Clifton. Indeed, it is Almásy’s passionate love for Katharine that reveals the self-serving purpose of his contempt for social inclusion and his unwillingness to take up the responsibilities pertaining to it. Not long after she emerges from the plane that brings her husband to Almásy’s desert camp, Katharine sets in motion the cartographer’s desire for interaction with a specific community, that of pre-war colonial Cairo: “When the Cliftons were not with us they were based in Cairo. […] A ceremonial life that I would slip into now and then. Dinners, garden parties. Events I would not normally have been interested in but now went to because she was there” (EP 234–5). Going on to state that “I am a man who fasts until I see what I want” (EP 235), Almásy gives himself away as an individual whose wish to retreat into a supposedly liberating landscape is, at least from the moment of his encounter with Katharine, motivated by his hatred of the regulated social structure that will not allow him to have what he wants: Geoffrey Clifton’s wife.⁵

Almásy’s position “on the periphery of […] society” can, if anything, be called a marginal one (EP 235). It lacks the creative potential accorded the ritual subject during the liminal phase because it serves no wider purpose; all it is meant to do is facilitate an illicit affair. The Libyan Desert is steeped in human history and, at this point in Almásy’s narrative, about to become one of the major theatres of the Second World War. In its state of being “half-invented” by Almásy (EP 150), the desert is not liminal. Rather, it is an environment in which the jealous cartographer can rid himself of responsibility for his, as it turns out, reckless decision to pursue Katharine. More precisely, Almásy fashions the desert into an environment in which one’s actions occur in spite of oneself and an affair becomes an inevitable, almost natural, occurrence:

He said later it was propinquity. Propinquity in the desert. It does that here, he said. […] [T]he propinquity of two or three bodies in a car driving the Sand Sea for six hours. Her sweating knee beside the gearbox of the truck, the knee swerving, rising with the bumps.

(EP 150)

Regardless of Almásy’s fantasies, the desert is precisely not detached from the “superorganic arrangement of parts or positions” to which Katharine belongs (RP 126). Accordingly, it does not take long for “the great English web” to “encircle […] the disease in the system” that is the affair of one of its subjects (EP 237). For all his efforts to engage with, but not invest in, social structure, Almásy is ultimately unable to elude the consequences of his interference in its set-up.

In San Girolamo, Hana is confronted with the brute manifestation of Almásy’s clash with two specific ‘systems’ of human interaction: the suffocating environment of Cairo’s pre-war British community (which sets in motion the string of events that lead to Geoffrey Clifton’s suicidal attack on his wife and Almásy) and the war-time circumstances under which the colourings of a plane can mean life or death (causing Almásy and the already deceased Katharine to be shot down from the desert sky in Clifton’s plane). In the moment of his accident, this network of consequences, arisen out of Almásy’s intermingling with social structure, becomes the chief physical marker of his identity. Thus, Almásy turns into the “nameless, almost faceless” patient (EP 52)—a development that proceeds, via the Bedouin who save him and the British officials who interrogate him, to its apex and conclusion in Villa San Girolamo. It is here that the figures of Almásy and the patient converge, and that the question of whether both are indeed the same character becomes, at least for my purposes, irrelevant. What is of greater concern here is that the moment when Almásy, as the patient, seems most removed from social structure is also the moment when he takes up responsibility for others. For the first time, Almásy/the patient is thus led to invest in the ties that bind him to his surroundings. The main tool for this development is his individualised version of Herodotus’ Histories.

As Brittan observes, “Ondaatje’s novel is filled with physical descriptions of books and excerpts from them, as well as libraries, scenes of reading and writing, and characters who delight in marginalia” (200). In other words, “The English Patient […] is […] a book about books” (Brittan 201)—and the text that features most explicitly throughout Almásy’s/the patient’s narrative is The Histories.⁶ In fact, the link between Almásy’s marginality and the patient’s liminality is provided by a personalised copy of this “commonplace book” (EP 96), which has miraculously survived the flames of its owner’s accident. In the book, Almásy has added notes ranging from the classification of different types of desert winds to diary-style recollections of his encounters with Katharine Clifton. The Histories have thus become a book which Almásy “has added to, cutting and gluing in pages from other books or writing in his own observations—so they all are cradled within the text of Herodotus” (EP 16).

Literally, Almásy has assigned his life to the margins of Herodotus’ book, turning his personal history into a sub-plot of what is considered one of the founding works of history in Western literature. In light of Almásy’s fervent desire to disappear off the face of an earth implicated in human history, this is, to say the least, remarkable. Amongst other things, The Histories document the fate of different political regimes and narrate the background to the wars between the Persian Empire and the Greek city-states (Ponzanesi 127). It is astonishing that Almásy inserts his personal experiences into one of the key texts on the turbulent intersection of oriental and occidental civilisation, a point of contact of which the Hungarian cartographer has personal experience and that represents all that he has supposedly left behind by ‘disappearing’ into the desert. More than associating him with a history from which he wishes to distance himself, Almásy’s appropriation of Herodotus’ text turns him into an active participant in that history. As the heterodiegetic narrator claims, “there is, after Herodotus, little interest by the Western world towards the desert for hundreds of years. […] And then in the 1920s there is a sweet postscript history on this pocket of earth, made mostly by privately funded expeditions” (EP 133). With the factual statement that, as a result, “the lost oasis of Zerzura was found by Ladislaus de Almásy and his companions” (EP 134), the Count is inserted into a chronology of explorers that leads, in a direct line, from the ancient Greek historian to himself.

What Almásy’s paradoxical relation to history and The Histories shows is that, for him, Herodotus’ text is ultimately no more than a tool for ‘cradling’ his mostly egocentric interests. By contrast, in San Girolamo, the book becomes a means for the patient to help others—more specifically, to guide Hana away from her forlorn situation. It is within the covers of The Histories that the history of the Hungarian desert explorer and the fragmented memories of the English patient converge and become meaningful for a wider group of characters. In the Tuscan villa, The Histories become the main locus of the patient’s life. Just as Almásy relied on Herodotus’ book for the (literal) framing of his experiences, the patient depends on it for the invocation of his memories. Indeed, the only means by which the patient may reclaim his identity before his death is by having Hana read to him from The Histories and various other works of literature, which help him relate to his own past, as well as the extensive range of topics covered by the personalised Herodotus. In these moments of mutual reading and recounting, the book that connects Almásy and the man dying in San Girolamo also becomes of interest to Hana, who is more than once “submerged within the crabbed handwriting in [the] thick-leaved sea-book of maps and texts” (EP 97–8). The Histories bind together Hana, the patient and the cartographer whose life he remembers in a doubly productive moment. First, because the patient relates Almásy’s narrative to Hana, she can “save him” from obscurity and allow him to die at peace with the wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Community “Beyond the Borders”
• 1 Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient: From a Crumbling Villa to a Porous Community
• 2 “Building the New”? Untimely Community in Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil
• 3 Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog: From Unwanted History to Unconditional Hospitality
• 4 Spectral Agency and the Ghostly Self: Towards an Unconditional Community in Wendy Law-Yone’s The Road to Wanting
• 5 Rethinking Community and Its Borders in Contemporary Postcolonial Literatures
• Works Cited
• Index