‘Powerful Joy’: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and Walter Benjamin's Allegorical Way of Seeing

university of toronto quarterly, volume 70, number 4, fall 2001 MARLENE GOLDMAN >Powerful Joy=: Michael Ondaatje=s The English Patient and Walter Benjamin=s Allegorical Way of Seeing There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations In section 9 of the >Theses on the Philosophy of History,= Walter Benjamin envisions the angel in Klee=s painting >Angelus Novus= as the >angel of history=: His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Illuminations, 257B58) Benjamin=s interpretation of Klee=s painting, which provides the foundation for his apocalyptic conception of history, remains both striking and enigmatic for several reasons: for one, in a profoundly anti-modern gesture, the angel turns to the past and is only unwillingly blown into the future; second, its melancholy gaze accurately discerns not a series of triumphs but a single unending catastrophe that piles >wreckage upon wreckage= B an image of ruin; and finally, the angel=s desire to repair what has been broken is paradoxically frustrated by nothing other than progress. In this essay, I want to draw on Benjamin=s writings, particularly his theories of history and allegory, because they isolate key formal and thematic concerns addressed in Michael Ondaatje=s novel The English Patient. Published in the final decade of the twentieth century, The English Patient also fixes its gaze on the past and traces the lives of four individuals who are caught up in the war: a badly burned man who may or may not be THE ENGLISH PATIENT and walter benjamin 903 English; his shell-shocked young nurse, Hana; the wounded thief, Caravaggio; and Kip, the Asian sapper. Together, they find temporary asylum in a bombed-out Tuscan villa during the final months of 1945. By the time they gather, the explosive forces of the conflict have already shattered their minds, bodies, and the opulent Villa San Girolamo, which they inhabit. Like the >angel of history,= who mournfully surveys a landscape of ruins, Ondaatje=s narrative maps a wounded geography B the architectural, bodily, and psychic wreckage caused by the war. As we will see, both structurally and temporally, the novel parallels Benjamin=s understanding of allegory and the fallen and fragmented character of human history. In what follows, I will outline the novel=s debt to a Benjaminian view of contemporary ruin and the non-progressive character of human history and then analyse the extent to which the novel portrays apocalyptic catastrophe as irrevocable. Ultimately, I argue that, in the novel, the discourses of science, art, and religion function as maps that convey crucial knowledge; if properly understood, these maps have the power to forestall disaster. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin advances his theory of the fragment or ruin in the context of a thoroughgoing analysis of allegory. As Peter Burger notes, Benjamin=s study outlines a fourfold concept of allegory; the first two aspects outline its production aesthetics and underscore its relation to the fragment: 1. The allegorist pulls one element out of the totality of the life context, isolating it, depriving it of its function. Allegory is therefore essentially fragment and thus the opposite of the organic symbol: >In the field of allegorical intuition, the image is a fragment, a rune ... The false appearance (Schein) of totality is extinguished= (Origin 176). 2. The allegorist joins the isolated reality fragments and thereby creates meaning. This is posited meaning; it does not derive from the original context of...