Comparative Cultural Studies and Michael Ondaatje's Writing

Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Questions of History

115 Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Questions of History Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek In this paper, I discuss the historical background of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of the novel to film. Ondaatje’s novel is fiction and the “truth” value of the historical background of this or any fictional text is of problematic and questionable relevance in the reading of literature or in the study of literature (that is, in most areas of literary study while in areas such as the sociology of literature this may not always be the case). However, research in audience studies shows that readers of fiction—or viewers of films—are voraciously interested in the “real” story of fictionalized persons and events. Indeed, in the case of The English Patient this has been the case and both the novel’s and its filmic version’s media coverage, reviews, web pages generated and internet chats, and follow-ups such as new novels, the (re)discovery of historical material, etc., suggest the readers’ and viewers’ interest in the historical background of the fictional renditions. In addition—as criticism of the novel and its adaptation to film shows—Ondaatje’s fictionalization of historical material raised questions in the minds of readers and viewers with regard to the problematics of social responsibility, history, and writing. It is in this context and perspective that I relate the novel’s “Almásy theme” and its historical background to the author’s treatment of the historical data and to the author’s notion of the Other. The context of the Other is based on the suggestion that Ondaatje’s concept in the Almásy theme is both specific (the cosmopolitan Central European) and universal. The English Patient was published in 1992 and won the Booker Prize in the same year and it also received a number of other awards such as the Trillium Prize. In 1996 it was released as a film, produced and directed by Anthony Minghella, with the cooperation of Ondaatje, and received seven Oscars (for a web site containing selected sources about the novel as well as the film, go to the Booker Prize Winners Web Site ). In her study “Michael Ondaatje and the Problem of History,” Ajay Heble observes that “Ondaatje has repeatedly been engaged in an attempt to incorporate marginal figures out of the historical past into a non-historical genre” (97). While this observation is written with reference to Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) and Coming through Slaughter (1976), it applies to The English Patient as well. Several characters in the novel are indeed such “marginal figures out of the historical past.” At the same time, we should acknowledge that Ondaatje’s method of using “marginal figures” from history does not make his prose works “historical” novels in any sense of the word. On the contrary, his postmodern use of the historical produces poetic fiction that “manages” history, as Heble observes: “The force of Ondaatje’s texts thus resides in their ability to articulate a tension between . . . an insistence on what On- 116 Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek daatje calls ‘the truth of fiction’—on his imaginative account of the past as being narratively faithful to the way things might have been” (98). The English Patient is a literary, that is, fictional text that succeeds in representing life—underlining its fullness, complicatedness, inexplicability, fragmentation, and its subtextual richness which cannot be represented by traditional uses and linear narrative of historical “facts.” Thus, an interpretation of the interrelation between the historical subtext , its fictional rendition, and in the latter the perception of the Other may be useful for readers and viewers of Ondaatje’s work. Some critics say that Ondaatje’s work, in general , is postmodern (see, e.g., Bjerring). To me, it is certain that his prose is lyrical and poetic, just as Alberto Manguel suggests “prose exquise, polie avec la précision et la beauté d’une marqueterie” (80). In addition, I propose that Ondaatje’s notions of historicity , his use of historical data behind the fiction, and his notions of the Other can be best analysed within the framework of comparative cultural studies (see Tötösy, “From Comparative” , 2003 “From Comparative”). Ondaatje’s concern with the historicity of his novel is evident on a different level too: After I had begun my research on Almásy right after the book’s publication, I wrote a letter to...