JOHN THE OBSCURE ™

By John Ruch

© 2007

Tales Told Out of School I: A Previously Unnoticed “Raven” Allusion, John Dishwasher’s Analog Viral Marketing Campaign and Why You’re an Englishman

I’ve been called an “academic” all of my adult professional life, usually in the same manner someone would be called a “witch” circa A.D. 1300. The difference is that this moniker can be (and is) true, so why not play along? In the past month, I somehow swallowed my disdain for the multiple medieval inanities of academe and enrolled in two undergrad courses at the University of Massachusetts.

(Incidentally, both were online courses, those wonders of modern pedagogy. The online course is to typical undergrad on-campus scholarship as open grassland is to a carnival pony-ride. Higher education has never been so accessible, self-directed and free of contact with beer-reeking frat boys. I strongly urge everyone academically inclined to join this revolution, especially through such high-quality venues as the Boston and Amherst branches of UMass, whose offerings far outperformed those of the supposedly prestigious private liberal arts college I attended as a credulous youth.)

I suppose it’s retrospectively obvious that the “John the Obscure” columns have been a sort of self-training for academe. And indeed, academe replaced “John the Obscure” in my life for the past grueling month. The practice of actual academic research and writing was quite similar—though, frankly, significantly less challenging and painstaking. That’s not a dig at my particular schools and courses, which, like a master chef shopping at a 7-Eleven, actually cooked up fruitful products from very basic ingredients. Perhaps it says more about undergrad studies in general and the idea of college as the new high school in this everybody-goes-to-college era, wherein now more than ever, the vast majority are seeking a piece of paper to reinforce themselves rather than a meditative forum to question themselves.

In any case, it seems only right that some of my recent academic writing take its place here at the family table. While the works are neither as rigorous nor as selfish as I usually demand from and indulge in myself, I’m still proud of the insights I was able to discover within the limitations and opportunities of academe.

This first batch of work is from UMass Amherst’s “Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture: How We Use Sexuality and Gender to Fashion Identity.” The invisible context for my own insights is the prodding of the brilliant instructor, who did not merely present us with standard critical theory-speak, but also her own insights, arguments and unresolved questions. Like all good teachers, she acted as a super-student. Any failures or failings, of course, are entirely my own.

Helga’s Web: Fashion as Freedom

This piece is a response to “Quicksand,” Nella Larsen’s remarkable Harlem Renaissance novel about a biracial—and, worse yet, artistic and intellectual—woman’s struggles to find a place of comfort in modern society. I was reminded here that undergrad academe is much like journalism—all writing comes with word limits. Here I have restored/rebuilt several cuts to my official submission, including the discovery, which I am apparently the first to make, of what seems to be an extended allusion to “The Raven” in the opening scene. (Page numbering refers to the 1994 Rutgers University Press edition that also includes “Passing.”)

That Helga Crane is a liminal figure drifting between the worlds of black and white, rich and poor, is obvious from the opening Langston Hughes quote onward.

What makes her outsider-among-outsiders dilemmas truly poignant is her standing as a member of the smallest minority of all: the intellectual aesthetes. Brooding constantly and feeling everything deeply adds to her pain: “She understood, even while she resented. It would have been easier if she had not” (29).

On the other hand, what Helga self-consciously describes as her “‘aesthetic sense’” is the root of her sense of self (44). The fancy clothing and objects with which she surrounds herself reflect the ornateness, the intricacy, of her inner life. Ultimately, they become Helga’s symbols of freedom, particularly from the notion of the “ladylike,” that three-pronged pitchfork of gender, class and race (12, 17-18).

The strikingly elaborate décor in the opening scene lays out this interplay between external objects and Helga’s internal world: “Only a single reading lamp, dimmed by a great black and red shade, made a pool of light on the blue Chinese carpet, on the bright covers of the books which she had taken down from their long shelves, on the white pages of the opened one selected, on the shining brass bowl crowded with many-colored nasturtiums beside her on the low table, and on the oriental silk which covered the stool at her slim feet” (1). Dressed just as richly, Helga reads an arabesque adventure novel (2-3).

The room is luxuriant, but also smacks of a haunted house; we’re told it offers “tranquillity” but is also “eerily quiet” (1).

It reminded me strongly of Poe’s “The Raven,” where lush trappings—“quaint and curious” books, purple silk curtains, velvet cushions, a statuary bust—reflect the rich sensitivity of the neurotically obsessed, depressed narrator. Indeed, I wonder if it isn’t a deliberate allusion, perhaps playing on the poem’s theme of “blackness.” “The Raven’s” narrator, also disturbed mid-book, is spooked by what he thinks is someone “rapping at my chamber door”; Helga never opens her door at night to “the rapping of other teachers” (1). And, brooding in her own brand of depression, Helga cries out, “No, forever!”—much like the titular Raven’s famous “Nevermore!”, though Helga’s fickle emotions can’t match the bird’s obduracy (3).

In any case, the scene gives us a clear equation between object and Helga: A breeze knocks over and shatters a “slender, frail” vase, a beautiful little thing that sounds much like Helga herself: “slight…delicate, but well-turned….” (4, 2). This exterior object expresses her inner turmoil, while she herself remains outwardly impassive—a pattern that carries through the story (4).

At the same time, Helga sometimes is treated by others as a kind of curio herself, which is a comfortable way to normalize her behavior as a malcontent. “We need a few decorations to brighten our sad lives,” another Naxos teacher tells Helga—the decoration being Helga herself (14). Helga later alludes to Ibsen, and there is something of his “A Doll’s House” here in the objectification of Helga and of her flight (49).

Helga has the utopian belief that money and the next town on the map will offer her freedom—not white freedom or black freedom, but freedom to be herself. Mere possession of $5,000 means that “now she was free,” she thinks (54).

In that frame of mind, she chooses a dress for a dinner party. As always, this object expresses Helga’s passive-aggressive self-assertion. She rejects wearing white because everyone else will; green because Anne, the friend she’s about to reject, will. Then:

“There was that cobwebby black net touched with orange, which she had bought last spring in a fit of extravagance and never worn, because on getting it home both she and Anne had considered it too décolleté, and too outré. Anne’s words: ‘There’s not enough of it, and what there is gives you the air of something about to fly,’ came back to her, and she smiled as she decided that she would certainly wear the black net. For her it would be a symbol. She was about to fly” (56).

This impractical, almost trophy item is the culmination of Helga’s complex expression through objects, and of attempting to surpass any boundaries. Normal feminine competitiveness might dictate choosing a different dress; but Helga chooses something that will make her completely individual (echoing her sense that “in spite of her racial markings…[s]he was different” [55]). Indeed, the dress goes beyond conventional limits of feminine propriety, just as it went beyond her working-class budget limitations to buy it in the first place.

For Helga, the dress is a secret “symbol,” an inside joke. It symbolizes “flying”—transcending the cultural definitions she feels so acutely. It also symbolizes literal flight—her plotted trip to a utopia where there are “no Negroes, no problems, no prejudice” (55).

Larsen’s description suggests that Helga may find a different sort of symbolism—that she may be a different kind of “fly” caught in that “cobwebby black net.”

Measuring the Circle: What’s in a Name in “The Red Tent”

This piece is my first response to Anita Diamant’s “The Red Tent,” a feminist revision of the fleeting Biblical character Dinah. At this point, the novelty of the thing was still allowing me to (mostly) overlook Diamant’s simpering tone, a state of mind reflected in my somewhat purple style. (Page numbering refers to the 1997 Picador USA edition.)

“One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.”

—Charles Fort, “Lo!”

“The Red Tent” moves like a wheel, the same points always revolving back to the top while the whole progresses forward. Like the scripture it subjects to its feminist gloss, it weaves history from a skein of like-colored images, each individual story tugging on those that precede and follow it. It unfolds in cycles and circles like the Moon that passes constantly through the story, reuniting the women in the menstrual tent.

Any passage in the first section (“My Mother’s Story”) chosen at random essentially would tell the section’s whole story in miniature. The remarkable passage on pages 68-69 in which baby Dinah names herself not only concludes the section, but richly restates and reprises it. It sets the story rolling into the middle section (“My Story”), where the scenario changes but the themes do not.

The scene begins comedically, with the baby’s three aunts quibbling over what to name her. Then the tone shifts to a quasi-mystical moment in which her mother, Leah, recites a list of names until the baby herself appears to choose “Dinah.”

The scene is an echo of the very opening page, with its discussion of the name Dinah (1). But it revolves all the way back to the Torah itself, where names have magical and cultural weight. (Notably, Diamant also wrote the book “Bible Baby Names.”) Shortly before Dinah’s story in Genesis, Adam is given the magic power of naming things, and her father, Jacob, is dubbed “Israel” by God for his struggles (Genesis 2:19, 32:28-29).

Diamant’s medium-length sentences and plain vocabulary reflect the Hebrew Bible’s narrative terseness. But this scene’s modest humor (the name Ishara is rejected because “it sounds like a sneeze”) is a sign that her intent is less reverent, more realistic commentary.

This round robin name game reminds us that the women aren’t just Dinah’s aunts, but also her polygamous “mothers” (2)—a single matriarchal unit that considers Dinah a mutual daughter. It repeats the story’s theme of surrogate motherhood, both metaphorical (Leah decides not to abort Dinah so they can all have a daughter) and literal (Bilhah has a child on Rachel’s behalf) (66, 52). It restates the intense feminine bond that supports them all in an often hostile, patriarchal world.

Likewise, when Dinah’s name is revealed after “the second full moon,” it isn’t just a pre-mechanical measurement of time (69). It’s a recurrent appearance by the Moon, which symbolizes the ring of women, as previously described, and Dinah’s place in its cycle.

The scene in which the baby “chooses” her name by stopping her suckling and looking up at the voicing of “Dinah” is an arabesque knot of symbols and self-references (69). Foremost, it affirms the entire book’s feminist irony of giving life, intense will and self-determination to a character turned into a mute trophy by the Bible (1).

There’s some suggestion that we should believe she literally chose her name. Women are often described in superheroic terms, from Rachel’s supernatural beauty to Leah’s Amazonian form. The women previously had similar heroic dreams about baby Dinah, and she is described as extremely precocious (66, 68). It all reflects how women are highly (perhaps excessively) valued by the book, which by contrast presents virtually all males as sheep-molesting monsters; a total inversion of the patriarchal Torah.

A more realistic interpretation is that it’s another instance of Leah using baby Dinah as a way to talk to herself, as she previously did in her dreams (66-67). Indeed, this mingled identity between mother and daughter, and one woman and all women, is perhaps the largest echo through the passage. Leah dubs the baby not only Dinah, but also, “My daughter. My memory” (69). This isn’t just an immortality metaphor. Feminine wisdom and personal history can be transmitted only orally, and only through daughters.

The passage makes a striking narrative pivot from Dinah recalling events in the third person to suddenly quoting Leah directly in the first person (69). “I”-meaning-Dinah becomes “I”-meaning-Leah with no notice except a quotation mark. If the book literally was the oral history it pretends to be, the switch would be unnoticeable to the ear and the blurring of identities complete. Leah’s words live again, channeled through Dinah to the middle-class Sunday School women to whom the book is addressed (3). The circle is enlarged and the cycle is complete.

Genre Over Gender: Love Conquers All in “The Red Tent”

The honeymoon was over; it was time to call Diamant a suburban simp and Rebecca a latter-day Yoda.

“The Red Tent” begins as radical Biblical revisionism, but ends as a romance novel with all the conservative elements the genre implies. Of course it doesn’t hate men. Its whole point is that monogamous, heterosexual love can conquer all.

Indeed, the only totally idealized character is a man: Shalem, the romantic prince. Gender is the story’s lifeblood, but genre is its heart, determining how that theme circulates. Romance is ultimately an integrated vision of man and woman finding happiness through equal union. The book clearly shares this view. (See how the lowering of gender boundaries is “like a dream” on page 109.)

The happy endings of romances generally presume the comforts and attitudes of middle- or upper-class married life. The book directly proclaims middle-class wives as its audience (3). And Diamant is herself a resident of tony suburban Newton, Massachusetts (according to her publisher’s Web site), happily married and holding fond memories of her father (according to the novel’s acknowledgements). This perspective colors the presentation of both genders in the book.

Men as a group don’t fare well in the book, especially in the first section, where virtually every male is described as a sheep-molesting monster. That goes right down to babies, where girls are beloved but boys’ penises are objects of derision (42). But this isn’t hatred. It’s the disempowered humor that pervades sitcoms and other popular middle-class forms: rather than change the power structure, you make nasty jokes about men. But only men in general, not the ones specifically in your life (husband Jacob is notably immune to most of the early commentary). As men are still considered powerful, it’s friendly joshing, in a way.

That’s the basic pattern of the novel: it embraces all the soft feminist touchstones—midwifery, New Age goddess worship, menstrual poetry—while avoiding harsher or more radical stances.

That’s not to say it accepts male bad behavior. It performs a Midrashic coup d’etat on the Torah’s patriarchy and El (Yahweh) himself. While it presents patriarchy as the overarching problem, it still seems to judge individual men as responding to it either weakly (Laban, and eventually Jacob) or strongly (Benia), specifically in the context of how they treat women.

This judgment is reversed with women; their bad behaviors are often excused as responses to patriarchy. For example, Re-nefer’s manipulations are responses to her arranged marriage in a despised distant fortress (228); and whatever happens among women in the red tent, oppression is the only reason there is a red tent in the first place.

Obviously, Diamant is an intelligent grown-up writing a serious novel; we wouldn’t expect the characters to be farcically simplistic stick figures, and they generally aren’t. But, especially as she moves from Biblical roots to her own inventions, Diamant does employ stock figures. Re-nefer is the aloof, domineering queen; Dinah is the naïve but spunky lower-class heroine whose struggles we enjoy. Some of the “complexity” of the characters is, in fact, built into these romantic stereotypes.

Rebecca, a key figure in refuting the idea of the book as feminist chauvinism, is built from all of these forces. Primarily, she’s a familiar romantic fantasy character—the obnoxious but wise witch/magician, her impatience derived from seeing beyond mere mortals. (She’s like a taller version of Yoda in “Star Wars.”) Her severe manners belie her keen insight and kindness (164-165).

She’s justified specifically by sticking up for “the great mother” against overwhelming patriarchy (157). She treats Tabea and her mother violently, but only because they have submitted to a male, rather than female, ritual (156-158). We learn that she’s bitter because she’s the last keeper of feminine wisdom (166).

At the same time, it’s possible to read her as a critique of radical feminism. Essentially rejecting her kindly husband, Rebecca lives in a fascist matriarchy where her followers all take the same name and wear uniforms. Dinah finds that aspect too bitter, the followers as “colorless as their robes,” and the whole thing a bit ironically reliant on male support (162, 161). It’s certainly anathema to Diamant’s romantic, chivalrous vision.

It’s hard to overstate the weight of this romantic template on the story. By the time the novel culminates in a 20-Kleenex torrent of nostalgia and sentimentality, it has jumped a gaping hole in the narrative: it never bothers to explain why the Genesis story that is its raison d’etre is still wrong in the Bible, since the family acknowledges and repents its crimes (316-317). (An alternative reading, that “Dinah is forgotten in the house of Jacob,” also fails to explain why the story is in the Bible in any form [312].) In giving us a romanticized Dinah who is memorable, the novel ironically leaves us with a Biblical Dinah who is even more mysterious.

Going to Meet the Men: Jesse’s Identity Crisis

This piece is my response to the feverishly nightmarish title work in James Baldwin’s story collection “Going to Meet the Man.” (Page numbering refers to the 1995 Vintage International edition.) Unfortunately, it wasn’t the proper forum to discuss Erik Erikson, the psychologist who invented the concept of “identity crisis” and had a bizarre one himself, as a Nordic-looking Jewish German.

Had this piece been for “John the Obscure,” I would also have mentioned the strange piece of analog viral marketing I discovered within the pages of the particular copy of this book I plucked from the shelves of the Boston Public Library. When I began flipping through the book at home, a small slip of white paper fluttered out, on which was printed the following (in approximate original format and point sizes, my quote marks added):

“Is she your ‘girlfriend’ or more than that?

You want to call him ‘significant other,’ but it seems too clinical, too census-like, too bureaucratic.

You both say ‘lover’ sometimes, but it’s kinda raw.

‘Mate’ is too much like a buddy.

‘Companion’ too much like a pet.

So what do you call him? What do you call her?

Read the word unmarried couples have been groping for since the ’60s.

Read

John Dishwasher

John Dishwasher

Spread the word

(follow the white box at johndishwasher.org)”

I shan’t ruin the surprise for you; I’ll probably leave that to whatever lazy alternative newspaper journalist eventually comes across this page. But, speaking as someone who has been in unmarried couples several times since the 1960s, words are not primarily what we groped for.

Young Jesse does not, of course, go to meet the man. He goes to meet the men: the lynching victim, his eponymous father, and the man Jesse will become through a horrifying synthesis. (And perhaps also The Man, in the ’60s sense, with the story’s timely dig at white authority figures.)

It’s a story about identity crisis, cognitive dissonance, doppelgangers—culminating in the frantic shapeshifting of the closing paragraph, where Jesse variously fantasizes himself a black rapist and a punisher of the same (249).

Jesse’s constant flux between identification and alienation with African-Americans is similar to a common male experience (and feminist critique) of pornography: the viewer alternately identifying with and objectifying the pictured person(s). This seems especially salient to Jesse’s experience at the sexually charged, snuff-porn lynching.

Baldwin’s psychological approach also echoes Martin Luther King Jr.’s sympathy for the devil—his belief that whites are also traumatized by living the lie of a racist system, and can find peace only in its end. (See the Nonviolent Resistance section of Stanford University’s King Papers Project’s web site: www.stanford.edu/group/King/about_king/encyclopedia/nonviolence.htm.)

We meet Jesse at a time of mental crisis, where he believes himself “good” but is wracked on a subconscious level (235). Black civil rights have turned the world into a “nightmare” where “everything [is] familiar” but “subtly and hideously displaced” (234).

Interestingly, Jesse has experienced this dis-, or re-, orientation before—as an innocent white boy with a best friend who is black. The drive to the lynching is a similarly surreal scene in which his parents look like “strangers” amid unearthly silence; his father becomes a distorted, grotesque figure with an unnaturally noticeable tongue (244). It’s a clue that little Jesse’s world view is in crisis and he is about to forge a new identity.

The lynching combines sexual, racial and masculine awakenings for Jesse, in memories he idealizes as a progressive triumph or “test” (248). Through the scene, he moves from identification and sympathy, to alienation, to a sort of appropriation of the victim’s experience as his own.

Jesse is physically bonded with his father, sitting on his shoulders. At first, he still has visions of common humanity, noting the victim has a widow’s peak, “like he had, like his father had” (246). But a naïve fascination develops, focused on male sexual characteristics: the victim is “a bigger man his father” (in more ways than one, as it turns out), his body hair and genitals closely observed. We rapidly learn that this is a distorted memory or psychological projection: Jesse is too far away to tell if the victim is screaming, yet can observe sweat dripping into his navel (246).

Still, Jesse retains some human sympathy, until he looks at the crowd and its reaction (likely for a cue). His mother’s face is suddenly more beautiful than ever and he feels “joy” as he essentially reorients himself to see the scene through her eyes (247). (The victim’s eyes, notably, have gone white [247].)

Suddenly, the victim becomes a “beautiful and terrible object”—a thing (247). Jesse now identifies with the liminal figure of the torturer, whose phallic knife reflects the dueling union and alienation of sexual violence. (Notably, there’s a hint here that the memory is embellished fantasy: while it is recounted in the present tense, here we are told that “Jesse wished that he had been that man [the torturer]”—a retrospectively emphasized desire [247].)

By the end, the victim is “merely, a black charred object” and Jesse is fixated on love for, and a bond with, with his father (248). Indeed, Jesse thinks of himself, rather than the victim, as having gone through a “mighty test” (248). It is as though the man’s power was consumed by his killers to live again in them.

With its hints that it is a reconstructed memory/fantasy, this scene is remarkable in showing how Jesse idealizes his ability to move from sick interest to avid enjoyment to a sense of power and identity. He sees it as a linear triumph that defines him, rather than a cyclical trauma that haunts him. His tragedy lies in this lie about himself; that he was able to meet the man, but perhaps can never go back and meet the boy.

Caravaggio’s Camera: Images Upon Images

This is the first part of a three-fer about “The English Patient,” Michael Ondaatje’s impressive (if eventually preachy) prose-poem novel that Hollywood somehow managed to turn into that stultifying celluloid mass wherein Ralph Fiennes was entrapped in gunk like the amber-bound mosquito in “Jurassic Park.” It’s a delicate yet somewhat difficult novel; as you can see here, I both enjoyed the risk of attempting to predict its momentum and the satisfaction of being right now and then, like some Paleolithic astronomer. A particular satisfaction with this piece was my later discovery, via a Salon interview with Ondaatje, that the particular scene that struck me as critically significant was in fact one of the three basic images with which he started writing (www.salon.com/nov96/ondaatje961118.html). (Page numbering in the following three pieces follows the 1993 Vintage International edition with a gunk-free Ralph on the cover.)

Dangerous business, this—pausing halfway through “The English Patient” and analyzing a descriptive moment. It’s like setting a gem when you can only see a few of its facets, unsure of how the light will reflect. In this prose poem about historical identities collapsing in on themselves, all moments are fractured symbols that wash over each other like waves from various storms. Ondaatje’s style is predicated on surprising us about the momentum behind his images, and what they may portend later in the narrative.

History, cultural and personal, seems to end with the war, leaving only half-meaningful ruins. It is suggested that any Renaissance optimism in the characters’ self-images died in a new bonfire of the vanities (57). The characters exist almost outside of context: “there is hardly a world around them and they are forced back on themselves” (40). They seem trapped in self-reflexive thoughts. They gather in the half-real, half-unreal villa; like a Borges librarian, Hana constructs a real staircase with fictional stories (13).

The entire narrative style is a series of disjointed images, like out-of-order snapshots, reflecting the scattered scraps of the characters’ identities. Their thoughts are often described through impressionism or stream-of-consciousness. The book even employs typography as concrete poetry, the long white space on page 46 illustrating the memory or image that isn’t there.

Perhaps the most image-conscious character is Caravaggio, the thief as rascally as the painter for whom he is named. (It’s an allusion we know to take literally, as his torturer, Ranuccio Tommasoni, has the same name [with a slight spelling variant] as a real person the historical Caravaggio killed [59; see reference at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravaggio].) Caravaggio the painter was notoriously self-referential, especially for painting his own face into images of severed heads. Caravaggio the character faces a dilemma about a “stolen image” of himself (36).

The character’s first name is David, quite possibly another artistic allusion—this time, to the renowned statue displayed only 20 miles away in Florence as the guardian spirit of the place. His name is an oxymoronic collision between high Renaissance idealism and Caravaggio’s morbid proto-modernism, which seems to be a theme of the novel as well.

Now a thumbless thief who is “not quite” anything, Caravaggio recalls his earlier crisis over an apparently accidental photograph of himself (34). This photo, which could reveal him as a spy, is the “stolen image” he must himself steal. Already holding the oxymoronic identity of a deputized thief, he returns to his ways to steal the camera from a villa. In the striking scene on pages 37-39, he drops all outer context and bluffs/sneaks his way in while nude, creeping into a darkened room and rolling silently on the carpet in search of the camera.

Then, groping in the dark, he finds “a breast of marble”—and the camera:

“His hand moves along a stone hand—he understands the way the woman thinks now—off which the camera hangs with its sling. Then he hears the vehicle and simultaneously as he turns is seen by the woman in the sudden spray of car light.”

The picture-containing camera hangs on a statue—the image dangling from an image. Startled into a pose by the sudden car headlights coming through the window, the naked Caravaggio becomes a kind of statue himself, a double image (36). The woman who took the offending photo is now in bed, having sex, but watching him. As further doubling of the images, the moment reenacts the taking of the surprise photo, suggesting a flashbulb effect (36).

Caravaggio’s pose(s) seem to symbolize all the characters. Everyone seems to be in a freeze-frame image, stuck on pause. There’s Hana in her disoriented shock, avoiding her own image in mirrors (50). There’s the faceless patient stuck in his bed and desert dreams. The scene also makes a connection between the use of the statue and its owner’s mindset. In practical terms, he rapidly concludes that she might store a camera there. Symbolically, it suggests that there is meaning in the way images are employed.

The weird, dreamlike sensuality and sexuality of the scene resonate as well, though more vaguely. The woman is detached from sex; her lover is almost phantasmal. She is unstartled by Caravaggio, her silent acknowledgment of him more intimate than her love-making. Much of the story has this feel of simultaneous closeness and remoteness, particularly the relationship between Hana and the patient, who both tend to speak at, rather than to, each other.

Finally, this image-obsessed scene is, of course, about images—the artistic ones, especially statues, that litter the story. Most immediately, it foreshadows Hana’s “white lion” statue, her touchstone for self-identity in tough times, and Kip’s devotion to the “Queen of Sadness” in the church mural (41, 72).

The Coming Storm: Nuclear Foreshadowing

The title of this piece is perhaps more evocative of a German thrash band than “The English Patient.” I also never really got to tackle Kip’s somewhat hard-to-swallow road-to-Damascus conversion to a baldly anachronistic pan-Asianism. Oh, well. Who wants to fall into the trap of pretending that this book is literally about World War II anyway?

Western civility goes out with an atomic bang at the end of “The English Patient,” a historic event that scatters its characters and clarifies much of its symbolism.

I said in my first response that it’s dangerous to analyze Ondaatje’s images too early, because he sets out to surprise us with what they may portend. How right I was. The very image I chose—the flashbulb-like moment of Caravaggio standing nude by the statue—turns out to be a ladder of such images leading to Hiroshima/Nagasaki (37-39). These moments of illumination end up illuminating the novel’s thematic spine.

We already know that the brutal war has left the characters in a postbellum malaise, unsure of who they are (57). But there is another shock in store; appropriately, it is often foreshadowed electrically.

As the quartet huddles in (or around) the half-alive villa, that bastion of Western civilization, storms frequently brew around them, spewing lightning in Gothic fashion.

During one such storm, a “new word…which is ‘nuclear’” leads sapper Kip to think of the lightning as the “machinelike” flash of a bomb (277). The reality and use of nuclear bombs are still unknown, so it is merely a passing metaphor to him—but not to the story, which, like Almásy, expresses faith in the simultaneity of past and future (258-259).

Shortly thereafter, Kip’s experience in booby-trapped Naples is recalled (278-281). It is particularly noted as the home of artifacts from Pompeii and Herculaneum, the West’s pre-nuclear bywords for utter urban destruction (278). There is word that the city’s electrical system will trigger scores of bombs when it is turned on: the city will either explode in a cataclysm or will be suddenly illuminated, alternatives that respectively reflect the result and the appearance of nuclear explosions (280). For good symbolic measure, Kip also recalls another recent moment of lightning flashes (279).

Sandwiched between and contextualized by these scenes is a brief passage on pages 277-278 that speaks in more abstract metaphors about lightning flashes, directly relating the nuclear “death of a civilisation” to the characters in the villa (286).

The passage describes yet another storm that, like the first nuclear weapons, comes out of the sky from somewhere else. The wandering, omniscient point of view floats over the countryside, ducking into chapels and the villa to observe the picturesque effects of sudden lightning flashes. The chapels contain religious statuary in frozen motion; the lightning flashes similarly freeze-frame the living people within the villa. The passage concludes by linking the images: “Perhaps this villa is a similar tableau, the four of them in private movement, momentarily lit up, flung ironically against this war” (278).

All the way back to the aforementioned Caravaggio scene, statues and people frozen to appear as statues are regular symbols. It tells us that images are being struggled with, that characters view each other as symbols, that they become frozen in their own traumatic moments, that they still search for meaning in Renaissance and religious ideals laid waste by the war.

This passage forcefully gathers and underlines these themes. The light falls on Renaissance/Baroque works, “biblical scenes” (277). Also illuminated is the villa, awkwardly described as “located where it is” to emphasize that “where” is within the Italian cradle of Western humanism, overlooking what Kip will later call, with dark implication, this “great valley of Europe” (277, 287). Idealistic, humanist art indeed is “flung ironically” against, and often shattered by, the debased war and the nuclear age to follow.

In its descriptions of the sudden freeze-frame effect and lethal power of lightning, the passage also suggests the murderous flash of an atomic explosion, which infamously left human “shadows” burnt into surfaces in Hiroshima. The idea is later echoed by “the ancient dog frozen in white ash” Kip saw in the Pompeii exhibit.

Like many other statue references in the novel, the passage also speaks to character identity. The language emphasizes the frozen motion of the religious statues: “the whip coming down, the baying dog, three soldiers…raising the crucifix higher” (277). Likewise, the frozen, stuck nature of the characters in the villa is suggested, both by the direct “tableau” allusion and by the explanation that they are all in separate rooms, captured in “private movement.” There may be some religious relationship as well, as Hana is earlier described as viewing Almásy—who is fundamentally a symbolic statue to her—as Christ (3).

The odd man out in this description, as usual, is Kip, who strolls unconcerned outside and thinks about Catholic imagery. There are indications that the entire passage is actually Kip’s point of view, his imagining of what the statues (which he has seen before) and the people look like in the lightning. It comes in the midst of Kip’s stories. We are told that he is thinking of the statues, and the opinionated comment at the end suggests Kip’s outsider thinking more than a pure narrator.

In any case, Kip will be the character most directly affected by the news of the A-bomb, and he thus takes the central place in the passage’s foreshadowing. He “walks with no qualms” under the ominous lightning in safe certitude that the odds of dying from a strike are “pathetically minimal” compared to his everyday bomb-defusing job (278). Scientifically, he “counts the seconds between lightning and thunder,” a familiar storm pastime (278). He thinks about art icons which have touched him so deeply. In short, he remains calm in his Western identity, his mechanical talents so useful to white bosses, his heart devoted to their art (and to Hana, who resembles some of it). He is still unaware of his emotional detachment, so clear in this passage, and of the possibility of a bomb no one can defuse.

You’re an Englishman: The Mysteries of Identity in “The English Patient”

The big Final Paper, wherein I follow the academic routine of pretending to be very certain about my wild guesses and intuitions.

“The English Patient,” as its anonymous title tells us, is at its core a mystery story about identity. Who is the English patient? The easy answer is Almásy. But the real answer may have been staring us in the face in the bathroom mirror during reading breaks. As the character fades from the last chapter, the English patient becomes us. (“Us” being any native speaker of the book’s English language.)

In style and substance, author Michael Ondaatje suggests that Western ideals of self-made individualism are (or can be) dangerous delusions. The English patient, more story than man, becomes his core symbol.

The setting, appropriately, is the tail end of World War II, that lasting blow to confidence in our own humanity. (We’re also told that “the end of war” in general, with its end to the momentum of social certainty, tends to leave people confused—what Hana calls with understatement a “period of adjustment” [55].) It allows Ondaatje to present fractured identities with both psychological sympathy and sociopolitical criticism.

As a sheer narrative device—a big, motionless spider at the center of the story’s web—the patient is explicitly about identity construction, serving as a catalyst for the other characters to rebuild their identities. He’s the workbench on which they work on their better, or truer, selves. He allows Hana to work out her nursing traumas and the death of her burn-victim father; Kip to face the complexities of dual citizenship; and Caravaggio to see someone who’s even more wounded and a bigger liar.

Indeed, we virtually never see anything in the present moment (i.e., within the villa) from the patient’s point of view. Instead, his experiences are frequently interpreted subjectively by others, as when Hana feeds him a luscious fruit: “He looks as if he will cry from this pleasure. She can sense the plum being swallowed” (45).

As a heavily disabled invalid, the patient appears to be viewed by the other characters as only partly human, the rest of him serving as a kind of movie screen on which to project their concerns. There’s a suggestion that one of his attractions for Hana is that he’s safely asexual (85).

All of the characters are mysterious, but the patient is truly a cipher, a “ghost” who is “unrecognizable” with “no expression. The face is asleep” (28). Only marginally alive in the present, he lives as a wash of obscure memories. (It could be said the novel is a ghost story told from the ghost’s point of view.) He has no name; his national background is an uneducated guess; his personal history is delivered as intellectual non sequiturs on such subjects as the hair color of Florentine madonnas: “He had rambled on, driving them mad…leaving them never quite sure who he was” (96).

(As a literally faceless, medically treated mystery guest who harbors dark secrets and often irritates those around him, the patient reminded me of H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man. Interestingly, his eventual antithesis, Kip, echoes the other famous “Invisible Man”—Ralph Ellison’s—in having grown “accustomed to [social] invisibility.” [197])

His mystery both inspires and motivates the other characters’ self-identity questions. Likewise, he uses them as semi-willing sounding boards for his jumbled memories.

But his significance goes far deeper than the character level of the novel and straight into its core theme and practice of identity construction.

The patient annotates his own history book into a disjointed pastiche; Ondaatje not only describes this, but incarnates it in this fragmentary novel that creatively interprets actual history (including that of the real Almásy). The English patient’s style is often “The English Patient’s” substance. There’s almost a sense of the patient escaping the bounds of fiction, the book expressing his essential character in its very form or even existence.

The patient is highly mysterious from the start, and the clues take time to put together. Ondaatje brilliantly takes advantage of the fundamental opacity and silence of written words in simply giving us no information about the patient’s accent, and very little about his looks, so we can’t draw pictures or judge for ourselves. Like the villa, the patient is both there and not there (13). He lurks mysteriously behind the jagged edges of the narrative’s fragmented passages.

But, fragmented though the tale may be, the patient’s identity unfolds and changes linearly, as his self-knowledge grows.

The sparse information at the beginning makes the patient sound like the very picture of the bold, romantic explorer of British lore, his desert search for a lost oasis calling to mind T.E. Lawrence or Indiana Jones.

The feverish description of the medicine man who heals him in the desert suggests not only appreciation but admiration: that the self-sufficient man “seemed a vessel to himself” (10). He is likened to figures from desert religious hermits’ visions: an “archangel” or a “baptist” (10). He carries “glass that had lost its civilization,” a kind of feralization of matter that appeals to the patient (10). The entire description says as much about the patient’s desires and self-perception as it does about the medicine man.

This idealistic vision of the purity of the desert turns into near dogma later on. “We became nationless,” the patient proclaims about he and his desert colleagues. “The desert could not be claimed or owned” (138). He describes wanting to lose his European identity, even his name, to the sands. “Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert,” he claims, proudly dubbing himself an “international bastard” (177, 176).

The patient speaks frequently in such heroic terms. Ondaatje speaks even louder with silence. What is omitted is any clear reason for the patient to desire such erasure. We’re supposed to take for granted, as a good thing, the implicit Western ideals of self-made individualism and forging oneself against the anvil of wild, natural places.

Or rather, we’re supposed to see that the patient takes them for granted. (Wounded and jaded, his enthusiasm has waned, but not his outlook.) Meanwhile, Ondaatje gives us many reasons to doubt this linear tale of identity creation, both textually and in the novel’s format.

The novel often employs self-conscious literary criticism, and particularly wields it against the certainties of history (personal and cultural). “Many books open with an author’s assurance of order…But novels commenced with hesitation or chaos,” Hana is taught by the patient, who is unusually ahead of his time in postmodern theory (93). It is also a description of the novel itself, which increasingly embodies its own philosophies.

The book begins with a prefatory quote from a supposed Geographical Society lecture, an initially baffling and weird fragment about the death of a man and the disappearance of a woman. Ondaatje later reminds us of the rich personal truths that are often censored out of scientific writing—something the patient himself deliberately engages in (241). In retrospect, the opening fragment contextualizes the entire novel as something that occurs between the lines of another, drier, less true document.

The obvious symbol encompassing both the patient’s self-creation and authorial doubt is the patient’s remarkable copy of Herodotus’s “The Histories,” the origin of history as a Western discipline. The patient freely annotates it, then turns it into a personal scrapbook of clippings and notes that bear sometimes vague relationships to his personal history. His own history becomes “cradled within the text” (16).

Ancient Europe may be the patient’s foundation, but he edits this background freely. He turns broad cultural history into specific personal history.

Then again, he annotates this giant hunk of Western culture, but never leaves it behind. Like one description of the patient himself, it is full of knowledge, but most of it is arcane, disjointed—more a collection of obscure totems than a self-illuminating history (18).

This dynamic tension can be seen in the first fragment of the patient’s book we’re allowed to read (via Hana), on pages 16-17. It is a remarkably colorful, almost grotesque history of winds, forces that erase, obscure, destroy, disappear. In speaking of “private winds,” we can see the patient expressing his affinity for these forces that turn the desert—and by extension, anyone in it—into a blank slate. But we can also see his method suggests madness: this “history” is an incoherent, fragmentary, sensationalist, romantic list of oddities.

The same can be said for the novel, which itself annotates and reconfigures the real histories of World War II and desert exploration. Fragmentary, nonlinear and imagistic (even down to the level of elided punctuation: e.g., “Some camels a horse and a dog”), the novel embodies its characters’ fumbling through the shards of memory, trying to rebuild a usable mirror (136).

The patient is the most opaque of these characters; when he actually is presented with a mirror, we are quickly pivoted away by the narrative so we don’t see him (and his own reaction is so calm, one wonders if there’s anything to be seen) (100). But if we reverse the metaphor of that first example from his Herodotus and read it as about the winds of history, we can see implications that he lives in a whirlwind of near-random memories that is slowly burying him under a dune of illusion, with all the weight of the ever-fattening book. (And, in the striking moment of concrete poetry on page 46, we can see his past rendered as a literal blank.)

Ondaatje uses several other deft techniques as clues to the patient’s delusional and confused identity. As character background, he has the patient declare himself an expert tour guide of trompe l’oeil (95). In a monologue, he has the patient speak with enthusiasm, if not with self-recognition, of living within a “fata morgana” (246). From the third person, he tells us that the patient can have delusions of grandeur; from the (implied) first person, he tells us that the patient has a rigidly fixed point of view in which mere motion can become an illusion of transformation (36).

On the other hand, he also spills the beans explicitly. “You think you’re an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have,” Katharine tells the patient (173). Yet even this becomes a kind of clue buried in the focalization through the patient, who mostly recalls Katharine as a violent scold in this stage of their bizarre, repressed love affair, which, like everything else in the patient’s life, seems only half-real.

In the novel’s present, the patient is certainly not an iconoclast—he’s an icon, a living statue. The latter stages of the book are devoted to exploring how little he succeeded in shaking off Europe.

The patient is already aware of part of the irony of his life: that by entering the supposedly blank desert to reinvent himself as an internationalist, he actually became the vanguard for European invasion (255). But he is truly shattered by information Caravaggio passes along—that some of his “international bastard” colleagues were in fact spies, good Europeans all along (255).

The irony only escalates from there, along with the patient’s status as an increasingly abstract symbol. The culmination, of course, is Kip’s attack on him as the incarnation of Europe-ness: “When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you’re an Englishman…You all learned it from the English” (286). The irony isn’t that the patient isn’t English, but that he is. His escape from Europe was just another act of colonialism; his beloved desert became a battlefield and graveyard. His burned, statue-like form suggests the figures of the dead from Pompeii, referenced on page 278, which in turn suggest the burned victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those new nuclear deserts. As he lies there, suicidal, drowning in these Sophoclean tragedies, we see him almost as a parody, rather than an epitome, of the romantic explorer.

That’s not to say he’s just a simple joke or a twist ending (though he is indeed both). The patient’s attempts at self-creation are in many ways successful: he’s an accomplished explorer, a brilliant academic and an individual so distinctive his fellows can’t easily pigeonhole him to any particular country or region. There is strength and determination to him. Indeed, it’s interesting to wonder how he might have turned out if his personal history hadn’t collided with geopolitical history in the form of the war.

But there was a war. There are wars all the time, in fact. Through the various characters, Ondaatje suggests that its brutalities will fracture anyone’s sense of self.

But the patient fractures along a particular fault line, one that we can describe in appropriately ancient Western terms as hubris. He has deluded himself into thinking his escape and reinvention to be complete, perfect and pat. The fall is long and hard. While the other characters tend to heal in some degrees, he continues to fragment and decay.

Ondaatje’s view of identity as incarnated in the patient appears to be syncretic: culture defines us deeply, but we can also consciously mold ourselves around other values. The danger lies in adopting the delusion that we are above society and culture, a stance that can be lethal to ourselves and to others.

In short, there’s an element of moral warning and exhortation to keep perspective. Ondaatje’s neatest trick is turning the book itself into a device that automatically questions our own identity.

In his final scene, the increasingly disoriented patient almost literally fades away, his hand briefly drifting to his fragmentary book (298). Then the English patient is gone, replaced by the English(-language) reader, his or her hand on this fragmentary book, confronting its final philosophies about identity.

The mystery of the patient’s identity is solved, and the mysteries of our own begin.

Posted Jan. 31, 2007.

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