Michael Ondaatje’s “International Bastards” and their “Best Selves”: An Analysis of The English Patient as Travel Literature

Abstract

MICHAEL ONDAATJE’S “INTERNATIONAL BASTARDS” AND THEIR “BEST SELVES” : AN ANALYSIS OF THE ENGLISH PATIENT AS TRAVEL LITERATURE DARRYL WHETTER University of New Brunswick For those cities that were great in earlier times must have now become small, and those that were great in my time were small in the time be­ fore. ... Man’s good fortune never abides in the same place. Herodotus (Ondaatje, The English Patient 142) The trouble with all of us is we axe where we shouldn’t be. Caravaggio (122) U n t i l as late as the 1960s, only bona fide travellers [those living at least five miles away from the supplier of his or her drink] were legally permitted to buy a drink on a Sunday in Scotland (Tannahill 326n). Perhaps even older and more pervasive than the depiction of the traveller as The Stranger is the depiction of life as a journey. Since at least The Odyssey, the journey has been a staple metaphor not only for life itself but also for any event in which time is applied to space (Butor 4). Travel is so involved in the tradition of storytelling that one can easily argue that the subject of storytelling itself is the inseparable companion to any serious literary depiction of travel. Structured with the conceit of four displaced characters gathered at a wartorn Italian villa, Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient involves several travels worthy of examination. The novel’s principal travels, those of Almasy through the North African deserts of 1930-1939, are of exceptional note for two reasons: first, Ondaatje’s well-documented situation of these fic­ tional travels within accurate geographical and historical circumstances, and, secondly, their overt affiliation with the project of storytelling. As a histori­ cal novel that is simultaneously superb travel literature, The English Patient is an ideal work for an examination of relations among story, travel, and fact. In its judicious and interactive uses of the tropes of the landscape as body and the landscape as text, The English Patient suggests that travelling itself is a narrative act; the journey is already a story before the hero sights home. The organization of Almasy’s travels by a design that is in turn both private and public, as well as being both finite and continuous, suggests that travel English Stu d ie s in Ca n a d a , 23, 4, Dec. 1997 inherently anticipates a reading or telling, which in turn anticipates an even­ tual communion (with the reader/audience). In emphasizing the physicality of landscape, traveller, and history, Ondaatje dramatizes both history and the traveller’s tale as projects that always occur in the present and into which both traveller and listener are already written. This immediacy of both travel and history renders the traveller’s tale adaptable yet perpetu­ ally incomplete. The English Patient's repeated examinations of landscape and history thus reveal the traveller as both spectator and participant in his/her tale. Through these three aspects of the traveller’s tale (anticipated communion, immediacy, and perpetual incompletion), the author suggests that the nostalgia that frequently characterizes travel writing is partially a longing for a return to the oral story and the promise of the betterment of the individual self and collective selves it offers. Accuracy demands a clarification of terms and premises. According to Edward Said, “texts are worldly ... and, even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted” (4). This worldliness of the printed text is given full dramatization in The English Patient both by the inclusion of references to Herodotus’s Histories and by Ondaatje’s announced reliance on articles from the Royal Geographical Society.1 The emphasis in The English Patient on the physicality and the worldliness of books in both telling and tale echoes Fredric Jameson’s pro­ nouncement that “history is inaccessible to us except in textualized form” (82). The concomitance of textualized history and the novel’s repeated fig­ uration of its landscapes with the textual traversing of them foregrounds their simultaneously historical and ahistorical attributes. As Jonathan...