The English Patient's Desert Dream
2007; Routledge; Volume: 18; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/10436920701525588
ISSN1545-5866
Autores Tópico(s)Indian History and Philosophy
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Many scholars recognize the intertextual dimensions of Ondaatje's novel, the dialogue it establishes by quoting multiple historical and literary sources including Herodotus, Kim, The Last of the Mohicans, The Charterhouse of Parma, John Milton, Christopher Smart, and Anne Wilkinson (Scobie 101). See also Robbins 24. Kip's very name, Kirpal, riffs on Kim's, Kimball, and Kipling (Simpson 220). For an overview of postcolonial approaches to Kim and Passage to India, see the relevant essays in Childs. Ondaatje's parents separated when he was eleven; he went to England to live with his mother and attend school, never seeing his father again, a circumstance that, along with the obvious influence of Kipling's Kim, perhaps informs his treatment of the various father figures in Kip's life. See Wachtel 49. Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), set in 1970s South London, reimagines Kim as well, from the perspective of Karim Amir, the son of an Indian father and English mother, whose acting aspirations confront the terminus of cultural stereotypes: on stage he plays Mowgli and later an "Indian." My engagement with Kim is influenced by Sullivan's study of Kipling, Narratives of Empire, which emphasizes Kipling's colonial ambivalence and interprets the novel as Kim's attempt to work through a succession of split fathers (145–177). Freud's discussion of family romances is especially useful in understanding Kip's interaction with Lord Suffolk and the English patient, father-son relationships that allegorize India's relationship to England. For Freud, the family romance is a dimension of a child's development in which, prior to puberty, the child imagines idealized parents in lieu of the denigrated actual parents. Once knowledge of sexual difference is established, maternal origin becomes fixed and the fantasy focuses on paternal origin because it remains in doubt (238–239). This is the principal argument of "Census, Map, Museum," chapter 10 of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities 163–185; for a critique of Anderson, see Chatterjee, "Anderson's Utopia." See also Huggan 1–33, 147–155; and Goldman, Paths of Desire 3–26. Midway through the novel, Caravaggio suggests to Hana that Almásy is Rommel's "Rebecca spy" (164), because he uses Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca as a codebook. Ondaatje's choice is telling: Rebecca comments on Almásy's relationship to Katharine insofar as the novel dramatizes the nightmarish turn, through the machinations of the demonic housekeeper, of a young woman's fairytale marriage to a wealthy widower. This is Sedgwick's synopsis of Between Men 83–96. Bruce Robbins argues "that the homosocial and heterosexual love in The English Patient exemplifies…an eroticizing of professional knowledge…" (25–26), in his view part of a larger pattern in the novel that presents cosmopolitanism as the avatar of aristocracy, the emergence of professional (transnational) knowledge as the contemporary version of aristocratic knowledge. See Kristeva, Powers of Horror 1–31; and Strangers to Ourselves 87–89; McAfee 116–134. Ondaatje narrates the story of Hana's childhood in In the Skin of a Lion (1987). Hana never knows her biological father, Cato, a Finnish Canadian union organizer who is murdered; her actress mother Alice Gull is accidentally killed by an anarchist's bomb. Patrick Lewis, who becomes her adoptive father, dies by fire in the war like the English patient. At the end of The English Patient, Clara, Alice's best friend and Patrick's lover, assumes the role of mother to Hana. Thus in nursing Almásy, Hana mourns both Patrick and Cato, the father she never sees. See, for example, Seligman 41; Balliet 162; Bell 73–74; Iyer 72; Mantel 23. As Hawkins and Danielson note, in a review of the novel that addresses issues of empire, Linda Hutcheon does not engage the politics of the atomic bomb (141); see also Scobie 94–96. See also Simpson 232. Ann Kaplan distinguishes the subaltern "look" from the imperial gaze (3–26); see also Timothy Corrigan's discussion of "glance aesthetics" (28–33). I am referring, of course, to Kristeva's seminal essay, "Women's Time," which distinguishes cyclical time (repetition) and monumental time (eternity), the duration of female subjectivity, from linear time (the time of history and the time of language considered as the enunciation of a sequence of words). Kristeva ultimately argues the relevance to contemporary feminism of assimilating the three senses of time—maternal time and political/historical time—in the same historical moment (187–213). See also Bhabha's discussion of Kristeva in Location of Culture 153–154. The concluding tableau of familial (national) and transnational bliss might be interpreted as overly sentimental, obscuring the poverty in postindependence India and the complexities of Indian nationalism as reflected in the differences between Jawaharlal Nehru, who embraced modernity while acknowledging its contradictions, and Mohandas Gandhi, who advocated the eventual dissolution of the Congress Party and "locates his politics in the villages of India…" (Radhakrishnan 197). 20th Century Fox dropped The English Patient as a poor investment mere weeks before shooting began, citing cost, especially for a film with no bankable stars, and the film's difficulty and 161-minute running time. The independent distributor Miramax released The English Patient to virtually unanimous positive reviews (Svetkey 25). Anderson reinterprets Leslie Fiedler's provocative analysis, which reads a muted homoeroticism in the relationship between Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook in James Fenimore Cooper's The Pathfinder (202–203). Additional informationNotes on contributorsAndrew ShinAndrew Shin is an associate professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles
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