The Time of Hospitality in Samuel Beckett's Murphy, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and Damon Galgut's The Good Doctor

Abstract

In this article, I focus on the temporal dimension of the differential process through which community constitutes itself. If community is premised on the sameness that is enabled by that which it excludes, and sees as a threat, then it must seek always to conserve itself and to render the future – which is hazardous in its uncertainty – calculable, predictable and determinable. In its search for stability and permanence, community must dominate time in such a way that it is overcome, that it withdraws from itself. Arguably, though, we would view time less teleologically and programmatically, if we could relate differently to the difference on which community depends. A form of hospitality that is predicated on an acceptance of otherness – not only that of a community's outsiders, but also the ‘common strangeness’ of its insiders – would alter the ways in which being-in-common is conceived, and would also change our experience of belonging. By the same token, such an accommodation could not but affect our experience of the temporality of the future. To accept otherness is necessarily to say yes to whatever may come, and therefore to live with exactly the kind of uncertainty and unpredictability that teleological conceptions of the future try to elide. After elaborating on the above understanding of hospitality – which has its roots in Samuel Beckett's notion of interminable waiting and Emmanuel Levinas's and Jacques Derrida's thought on hospitality – my article traces some of the ways in which Michael Ondaatje, in The English Patient, and Damon Galgut, in The Good Doctor, engage with the temporal dimension of community's dependence on difference.