Seeing Everything in a Different Light: Vision and Revelation in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient

1 The phrase is M.H. Abrams’s characterization of the Bible’s resolution. In his discussion of the way biblical narrative has provided ‘the shape of history and the destiny of mankind’ (9),Abramsfocuses on its apocalyptic conclusion with its renewed emphasison the duality between light and darkness that runs throughout the Bible. He observes that because the university of toronto quarterly, volume 70, number 4, fall 2001 K R I S T I N A K Y S E R Seeing Everything in a Different Light: Vision and Revelation in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient AN APOCRYPHAL STORY David Roxborough has recently suggested that Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient ‘is exalted by appropriating the unique holy status of Christian imagery’ (236) and that the characters take on the qualities of biblical figures because it ‘lend[s] them a temporary grandeur’ (239). He adds that even the characters’ criticism of biblical images and motifs ‘only serves toperpetuate their [i.e.the images’] significance’ (246). I wouldargue instead that The English Patient provides a complicated challenge to biblical revelation, both as violent apocalyptic climax and as way of seeing. Drawing attention to the dangerous historical legacy of such revelation, the novel calls for another vision – a way of ‘seeing everything ... in a different light’ (284) that takes into account what Ondaatje calls ‘the variousness of things’ as opposed to offering ‘one demonic stare’ (Bush, 248). Ondaatje’s novel goes far beyond what Roxborough describes as an ‘imagistic’ use of myth (243) because the fact that its characters fluctuate between associations with positive and negative biblical figures seriously undermines the fundamental dualism on which all biblical narrative rests. For example, the English patient Almásy (who is not English) may have the ‘[h]ipbones of Christ’ (English Patient, 3), but he is also a Satanic figure who falls burning from the sky during ‘the war in heaven’ (5). The novel underlines these shifts in identification: after his fall from ‘heaven,’ Almásy ‘could not remember where he was from. He could have been, for all he knew, the enemy he had been fighting from the air’ (6). Described as both a ‘despairing saint’ (3) and as Adam (144), when he’s interrogated by the Allies, he rambles on, ‘driving them mad, traitor or ally, leaving them never quite sure who he was’ (96). By having a character take on such shifting attributes, Ondaatje creates a pattern of allusion that works against the ‘reductive historical thinking’ fostered by the Book of Revelation.1 The climax of this use of biblical 890 kristina kyser ‘consummation of history will occur, not by mediation ... but only after the extirpation of the forces of evil by the forces of good,’ this ending ‘has fostered a dubious heritage of reductive historical thinking in terms of absolute antitheses without the possibility of nuance, distinction, or mediation. Complex social, political, and moral issues are reduced to the two available categories of good and bad, right and wrong, the righteous and the wicked’ (11). allusion comes in the tenth and final chapter of The English Patient. As one of the twelve sappers left behind in Naples to discover whether the city is in fact doomed to explode after the electricity is turned on, Kip considers the alternatives – ’Walls will crumble around him or he will walk through a city of light’ (280) – as he rests beneath two statues depicting the Annunciation to Mary: ‘the tableau now, with Kip at the feet of the two figures, suggests a debate over his fate. The raised terra-cotta arm a stay of execution, a promise of some great future for this sleeper, childlike, foreignborn ’ (281). Although Roxborough is right to connect the scene to the final ‘assignment of the damned and the faithful to their respective Hell and Heaven’ (251), it goes beyond simply linking the moment to the Day of Judgment, with its alternatives of destruction or light, and raises the larger and more problematic issues of who is damned and who decides who is damned. In a tableau that brings together the beginning and the end of the New Testament (the annunciation of the coming birth of Christ and...