Ethics and Healing: Hospital/ity and Anil's Ghost

Michael Ondaatje's most recent novel, Anil's Ghost (2000), is his first work of prose to examine the civil war in Sri Lanka, his nation of origin. Jon Kertzer argues that despite its subject matter, this text 'is not a political novel in the traditional sense: it offers little political analysis and foresees no political solutions' (131). Many reviewers of the novel castigated Ondaatje either for sidestepping politics or for privileging one side of the conflict over the other (see Derrickson, 131; Goldman, 28; Kanaganayakam, 53n). In what follows, I argue that the novel does deal with the political crisis, through relations of hospitality on an individual scale – particularly through the circumstances surrounding Anil and her human rights investigation in her nation of origin – and on the scale of the nation-state in violent turmoil. Both the novel and Ondaatje's subsequent comments about the text suggest the impossibility of a purely political solution and the necessity of insisting upon the ethical as a way to heal the nation. The text presents hospitality and its embodiment in healing as necessary to the process of reconstruction, both personally and nationally.

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In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida argues that 'hospitality is not simply some region of ethics, let alone ... the name of a problem in law or politics: it is ethicity itself, the whole and the principle of ethics' (50). His work on hospitality derives chiefly from his reading of Levinas and Kant. Derrida sees Levinas's Totality and Infinity as 'an immense treatise of hospitality' (21) through its emphasis on the face as the manifestation of the Other. For Derrida, 'hospitality becomes the very name of what opens itself to the face, or, more precisely, of what "welcomes" it' (21). Levinas reads the relation with the Other as the ethical relation: 'The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics' (43). Similarly, Derrida views absolute hospitality as presupposing a relinquishing of the power of the host: 'Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any anticipation, before any identification, whether or not it has to do with a foreigner, an immigrant, an invited guest, or an unexpected visitor' (Of Hospitality, 77).

Derrida's emphasis on the Other as foreigner or immigrant recalls Immanuel Kant's essay 'Perpetual Peace' and its argument for a 'cosmopolitan right' based on 'universal hospitality': 'In this context, hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else's territory' (105). 'Perpetual Peace' defines this cosmopolitan right as part of Kant's outlining the conditions that would facilitate the cessation of all hostilities between states. As Derrida notes of 'Perpetual Peace,' 'universal hospitality is here only juridical and political; it grants only the right of temporary sojourn and not the right of residence' (Adieu, 87). Derrida thus distinguishes 'between unconditional hospitality and ... the rights and duties that are the conditions of hospitality' (Of Hospitality, 147). As he points out, absolute hospitality is not to be circumscribed by rights or obligation:

absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner (provided with a family name, with the social status of being a foreigner, etc.), but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names.

(25)

This conception of hospitality extends beyond the limitations of Kant's, and aligns itself with Levinasian ethics.

For the purposes of reading Ondaatje's novel, I wish to keep both strands of hospitality in play: Kant's focus on the rights of strangers on foreign territory and Levinas's ethical relation with the Other. I invoke Kant because of the complications surrounding the national identity of the protagonist, Anil, whose Westernization compromises her self-identification and identification by...