Comparative Cultural Studies and Michael Ondaatje's Writing

Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Altered States of Narrative

16 Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Altered States of Narrative Beverley Curran In his discussion of translation, George Steiner recalls Saint Jerome’s representation of that process as “meaning brought home captive by the translator” (Steiner 298). From both within and without, former European colonies have been seen as “translations” of a distant and idealized original whose standards have been transplanted and reduced to “imperfect copies, characterized by absence or imitation” (Brydon and Tiffin 57). In a search for origins, we will find not a source but absence, dispersal, and loss. In Australia , alongside the more potent legend of Ned Kelly is the story of Eliza Fraser, a “captivity narrative” of “first contact” operating as a key myth in the process of translating nationhood into being. Like that of Ned Kelly, the Eliza Fraser story inspired a series of paintings by the Australian modernist Sidney Nolan. Nolan’s images, in turn, provoked the imagination of Sri Lankan Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje, who rewrote the story in his early long poem, The Man with Seven Toes (1969) inspired only by “the account in the paintings” (Barbour 220) and Colin MacInnes’s succinct and rather snide version of that story that appears in the catalogue of the 1957 Whitechapel Gallery exhibition , Nolan’s first major retrospective, and which Ondaatje includes as an afterword to his long poem: Mrs Fraser was a Scottish lady who was shipwrecked on what is now Fraser Island, off the Queensland Coast. She lived for 6 months among the aborigines , rapidly losing her clothes, until she was discovered by one Bracefell, a deserting convict who himself had hidden for 10 years among the primitive Australians . The lady asked the criminal to restore her to civilization, which he agreed to do if she would promise to intercede for his free pardon from the Governor. The bargain was sealed, and the couple set off inland. At first sight of European settlement, Mrs Fraser rounded on her benefactor and threatened to deliver him up to justice if he did not immediately decamp. Bracefell returned disillusioned to the hospitable bush, and Mrs Fraser’s adventures aroused such admiring interest that on her return to Europe she was able to exhibit herself at 6d a showing in Hyde Park. (The Man with Seven Toes n.p.) According to Kay Schaffer in her examination of the Eliza Fraser stories, gaps in that captivity narrative facilitate speculative supplements like the MacInnes version. There is an absence of verifiable data concerning both the characters and circumstances: there are no records of birth or death for Eliza Fraser—she may have been born in Ceylon —nor convincing evidence to confirm the details of the shipwreck, captivity, or rescue . What can be verified is that Fraser’s “captivity” lasted six weeks rather than months, and that “the popular Queensland version of her rescue and sexual liaison dur- Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Altered States of Narrative 17 ing a lengthy trek back to Moreton Bay with the convict David Bracefell did not occur, although historians still speculate that Bracefell may have been involved as a helpmate to her official rescuer . . . and his ‘contact’ with Mrs Fraser may well have been sexual” (Schaffer 136). In writing his long poem, Ondaatje was not interested in investigating the historical account of the Fraser story nor in explaining it to his readers: “It had to be brief and imagistic because the formal alternative was to write a long graphic introduction explaining the situation, setting, characters, and so on. All the geographical references in the book are probably wrong and I’m sure all Australians think that the book is geographically ridiculous, just as the people of the south-west might think Billy the Kid is” (Solecki 20). Just as “the cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history” (Ondaatje, The English Patient 119) were sought out by Herodotus in The Histories, MacInnes’s modulated version of the Fraser story interests Ondaatje as “the supplementary to the main argument” (119), as do the obscured “historical” figures of Billy the Kid and Buddy Bolden, or the elusive desert topography of the American Southwest or the Sahara. The English Patient, I suggest, reconfigures radically the nebulous representation at the core of these narratives as a translator who exists in and as the dead centre of powerful cultural tensions. Whereas Douglas Barbour contends that for Ondaatje, the father appears as a writer, as a “kind of romantic artist [that] is a paradigm of all...