Fragmentation Broken Boundaries

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Fragmentation (Broken Boundaries)
Boundary-Crossing

• The English Patient

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Outline

• The Issues of Boundary
• Introduction Michael Ondaatje
• Chaps 1-3 plot summary
• Starting Questions
• The War and its Impacts
• the Bedouin boundary-breaking
• Healing Process 1) Reading and Writing 2)
  Communication 3) Remembering and Reinterpreting
  the past.

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The Issues of Boundary in postmodern society
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The Issues of Boundary in The English Patient

• Physical, Personal and Interpersonal Boundaries
• Textual Boundaries
• Geographical and National Boundaries
• Imagistically, they are mixed together and
  interrelated.

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Michael Ondaatje as a multiple migrant

• 1965 -- B.A. at University of Toronto
• A poet and a novelist, winner of several awards.

• Michael Ondaatje was born on September 12, 1943
  in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).
• As a result of his father's alcoholism,
  OndaatjeÕs parents eventually separated in 1954
  and he moved to England with his mother
• 1962-64, Ondaatje attended Bishop's University in
  Lennoxville, Quebec.

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Michael Ondaatje

• Criticized for
• criticized for not writing much about Canada and
  Sri Lanka, or writing in a politically correct
  way.
• the use of violence (e.g. the inclusion of atomic
  bomb) ? his response trying to find a balance
  between gentleness and violence (Leckie 29).

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The English Patient Setting

• Places
• 1.the Villa San Girolamo in Tuscany a nunnery,
  used as a field hospital, like a besieged
  fortress
• 2.South Cairo the desert
• 3.Kip Lahore? the English countryside
• Time
• 1.right after WWII 1945
• 2. 1943 the first Canadian infantry p. 49
• 3.South Cairo1930-1938 esp. 1936

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EP Chaps 1-2

• The Villa Hanas taking care of EP, her reading,
  the villa, the desert, and the desert tribes
• In Near Ruins Hana and Caravaggio in near
  ruins their respective experience of the War and
  its influences on them, their memories, the
  arrival of Kip

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EP Chaps 3

• Chap 3 Sometime a Fire
• Kips ways of surviving the war and protecting
  Europes cultural heritage,
• Hana communicating with Caravaggio (remembering
  Patrick) and Kip (e.g. two bomb episodes bring
  them closer to each other)
• Hana reading to EP EP remembers seeing Hana
  for the first time
• the four of them connected one way or another.

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Questions about Fragmentation and Reconstruction
focused on chaps 1-2

• Self-Other
• Why do you think the desert winds and the tribes
  customs are important? How is the EP related to
  them?
• How do the Bedouins treat the EP, as opposed to
  Hanas way of treating him?
• War its Aftermath
• How does the War influence the place, the three
  characters we have seen so far?
• Reading What is the importance of readingfor
  Hana and for the EP?
• Memory Why is the novels narration fragmentary?
  
• What do the characters memories reveal about
  them?

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The War its destructiveness

• the Villa Pp. 11 (a hole in the librarywound),
  
• The characters reside amongst "dead cattle.
  Horses shot dead, half eaten. People hanging
  upside down from bridges. The last vices of war"
  (29)
• The War in historical context The last mediaeval
  war was fought in Italy in 1943 and 1944.
  Fortress towns on great promontories which had
  been battled over since the eighth century had
  the armies of new kings flung carelessly against
  them. Around the outcrops of rocks were the
  traffic of stretchers, butchered vineyards,
  where, if you dug deep beneath the tank ruts, you
  found bloodaxe and spear" (69)

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The War boundary-breaking

• P. 13 Some rooms faced onto the valley with no
  walls at all, even turned into an open aviary
  (??)
• P. 43 wild gardens like further rooms.

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Breaking the boundaries between nature and the
human

• The dogs paw p. 8
• EP mask of oasis reeds drags strength into his
  body from the universe p. 9
• Bottles of the glass man ? sea p. 10
• Appearance of Caravaggioo the moon light p. 31
  

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the Bedouin boundary-breaking

• pp. 17-19
• Nomads as water people Caravan like a river,
  spilled and slid over sand 19
• vs. EP as a specialist on cartography In the
  desert it is easy to lose a sense of
  demarcation.
• Nourishing Almasy e.g. 6 (dates and saliva), 23
  (semens)
• 21-23 serves them by drawing maps and explaining
  guns

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The Wars Influence on the characters

• EP the man with no face p. 48 ? without
  identity. (actually a Hungarian cartographer?
  next time)
• Caravaggio an Italian thief used in the war
  photographed caught when trying to get his
  photo.
• p. 33 lost my nerve and thumbs p. 34 frantic
  or too calm
• p. 39 hide his thoughts and prefers to eat alone
• p. 40 has no plots to set in motion is
  interested only in Hana. . . .now there is
  hardly a world around them and they are forced
  back on themselves.
• p. Obsessed by the traumatic moment 60

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The Wars Influence on the characters

• Hana -- p. 7 scurry of a mouse in the mind, a
  moth by the window
• -- shell-shocked p. 41 experience of death
  50-51 her child 82, deaths 83 focuses on the
  white lion 40-41
• -- fixated on EP 41 84 Patrick 90-91
• -- a nomad p. 13
• -- make her own rules p. 14 the child game of
  hodge-podge 15
• -- recollection before bed 35 rest 49
• -- removes all the mirrors ?41? looks at herself
  in the mirror p. 52

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How do they heal themselves

• Reading
• Mutual support
• Memories and story-telling.

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Reading

• EP listens to stories like swallowing water
  (5)
• "This history of mine,' Herodotus says, 'has
  from the
• beginning sought out the supplementary to the
  main argument. What you find in him are
  cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history--bow
  people betray each other for the sake of nations.
  (118-19)
• ? Writing -- The Histories by Herodotus "added
  to, cutting and gluing in pages from other books
  or writing in his own observations-so they all
  are cradled within the text of Herodotus," memory
  offers not a linear movement from past to future,
  but instead, offers a vision of the past as ruin
  (16).

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Hana Reading ? Writing

• Hana? reading for EP reads Caravaggio
• pp. 7-8 1) once the only door out of her cell
• 2). the porousness of the paper not
  minding the gaps in plot
• p. 12, --immersed in the lives of others . . .
  her body full of stories and situations 36
• p. 93 books like landscapes they have
  traversed taught by EP.
• p. 61 writing The Last of the Mohicans

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Communication between Hana EP

• Mutual dependence p. 5
• EPs recognition of her 95-
• EP as a despairing saint father complex
• Reading half of her life, while the EP teaches
  her how to read pp. 93-95

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Communication between Hana Caravaggio

• Know each other at home (used to be her teacher
  and her Scarlet Pimpernel. ??? 55)
• Caravaggio p. 29 I need gelato.? Hanas
  response p. 31
• uncle and an emotional support p. 30
• Sharing memories of the past (about her father
  and her childhood)
• On their experience of the war pp. 82- 85
• Caravaggio wants to reveal EP for Hana 117
  concerned with Hana and Kip p. 121

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Memories Flashbacks

• e.g. Caravaggios flashbacks
• Discussion pp. 35 (photo) ? narration 36 (caught
  in mid-step again and released by her)? 37 (how
  her room was found ?
• Discussion 54 -55? narration 58 --
• ? The novels fluid narration Hana's first
  encounter with Kip 75 -- first from Hana's
  perspective, then Caravaggio's and then Kip's

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Memories Story-telling leading the listen into
his mind and past

• EPs stories slip from level to level like a
  hawk"
• he whispers again, dragging the listening heart
  of the young nurse beside him to wherever his
  mind is, into that well of memory he kept
  plunging into during those months before he
  died.

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Memories fragmentary and with unstable meaning

• Remembers the game of Pelmanism he played with
  his aunt This had been in another landscape, of
  trout streams, birdcalls that he could recognize
  from a halting fragment. A fully named world.
  Now, with his face blindfolded in a mask of grass
  fibres, he picked up a shell and moved with his
  carriers, guiding them towards a gun, inserted
  the bullet, bolted it, and holding it up in the
  air fired. . . . "For echo is the soul of the
  voice exciting itself in hollow places." A man
  thought to be sullen and mad had written that
  sentence down in an English hospital. And he, now
  in this desert, was sane, with clear thought,
  picking up the cards, bringing them together with
  ease, his grin flung out to his aunt, and firing
  each successful combination into the air, and
  gradually the unseen men around him replied to
  each rifle shot with a cheer. (20-21)

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Communication between Hana Kip

• Her need of his support (103)
• His need of her shoulder (114-15)
• Intimacy and distance (125 27)

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Next Week

• More on Chaps III Kips presence in the Villa
  and his past Kip and the English Patient
• Chaps IV VI Katherine and Almasy