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6 _ “A Flame against a Sleeping Lake of Petrol’’ Form and the Sympathetic Witness in Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost PATRICIA P. CHU No more would I step out of that room and make my way . . . to the altar, a creature beautiful and adored, the personification of all that was good and perfect in the world. —Funny Boy, 39 American movies, English books—remember how they all end? . . . The American or the Englishman gets on a plane or leaves. . . . It’s probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. —Anil’s Ghost, 285–6 Funny Boy and the Sympathetic Reader T HIS ESSAY ASKS how the formal conventions of the classic realist novel relate to its thematic and ideological concerns in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, two novels written by Sri Lankan-Canadians, set in Sri Lanka in 1977–83 and 1992, respectively, and explicitly concerned with portraying violent political turmoil and its effects on ordinary people.1 Though set outside North America and unconcerned with U.S. or Canadian relations with Asian countries or people, these texts share with Asian North American texts the drive to interpellate the reader as a sympathetic observer of social injustices. Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy depicts the maturation of its narrator, Arjun Chelvaratnam, within a middle-class Tamil family during a period of increasing civil disturbances and publicly sanctioned anti-Tamil discrimination and violence. A series of searing epiphanies mark the title character’s “ A F L A M E A G A I N S T A S L E E P I N G L A K E O F P E T R O L ’ ’ / 87 growing awareness of his double minority status as a Tamil and a homosexual . A classic realist novel, Funny Boy interpellates the reader as an ally of Arjie, the boy protagonist and the adult narrator, as he witnesses the failures of his family, school, and country. To amplify its hailing of the reader as a sympathetic middle-class witness, Funny Boy uses a range of devices intrinsic to classic realist fiction, including the narrator’s signifying on the trope of the domestic heroine; the lyric epiphany stating the theme; the star-crossed love plot; the training of the reader’s sympathy from lesser to greater shock; and colonial intertexts that interpellate the reader as knowing, tasteful, kind, and just. These familiarizing elements position the reader to accept Arjie as the ideal Althusserian “subject’’ of the realist novel, one who both identifies as a national subject and holds an exemplary subject position with which the reader is pressed to identify; thus Funny Boy expands the subject of the realist novel to include a protagonist who is both homosexual and rooted in political struggles specific to Sri Lanka.2 Arjie is quickly established as possessing the sensitive, imaginative interiority identified with the heroines of nineteenth-century domestic novels. In the first chapter, “Pigs Can’t Fly,’’ the adult recounts his travails as a seven-year-old boy on the family’s monthly “spend the days,’’ Sundays when cousins played together with minimal supervision while the parents enjoyed a day out; he quickly maps out how the games were segregated by gender and territory. The front garden, road, and field in front of the house are claimed by the boys, whose cricket games permit them to rehearse for adult masculinity by joining the two teams’ “struggle for power.’’ Arjie, however, prefers the girls’ realm, in which he leads due to the force of his imagination ; his account instantly establishes him as a surrogate for the (feminized) reader, while driving away readers unable to enter this female-centered imaginary . In the favorite game, bride-bride, Arjie revels in being dressed as the bride, because cross-dressing allows him “to leave the constraints of myself and ascend into another, more beautiful self’’ (4). Transcending his sex, individual self, and ethnic identity, Arjie envisions himself as “magnified, like the goddesses of the Sinhalese and Tamil cinema, larger than life,’’ an exemplary subject of the nation or, as he puts it, an “icon’’ adored by “the world’’ (4–5). As the imaginative middle child, Arjie is contrasted with his competitive , coarse, unimaginative older brother, Diggy, and his sympathetic but conventional younger sister. In “Pigs,’’ this structure is amplified by Arjie’s estrangement from his father and his alignment with his mother (Amma). When Arjie...

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