Fragmentation (Broken Boundaries) & Boundary-Crossing

1. Fragmentation (Broken Boundaries) & Boundary-Crossing The English Patient

2. 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.

3. The Issues of Boundary in postmodern society

4. 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.

5. 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. 1965 -- B.A. at University of Toronto A poet and a novelist, winner of several awards. Michael Ondaatje –as a multiple migrant

6. 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).

7. 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

8. EP: Chaps 1-2 • The Villa: Hana’s 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

9. EP: Chaps 3 • Chap 3 –Sometime a Fire • Kip’s ways of surviving the war and protecting Europe’s 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.

10. Questions about Fragmentation and Reconstruction –focused on chaps 1-2 • Self-Other: • Why do you think the desert winds and the tribe’s customs are important? How is the EP related to them? • How do the Bedouins treat the EP, as opposed to Hana’s 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 reading—for Hana and for the EP? • Memory: Why is the novel’s narration fragmentary? What do the characters’ memories reveal about them?

11. The War –its destructiveness • the Villa Pp. 11 (a hole in the library—”wound”), • The characters reside amongst "[d]ead 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)

12. The War –boundary-breaking • P. 13 Some rooms faced onto the valley with no walls at all, even turned into “an open aviary” (鳥舍) • P. 43 – wild gardens like “further rooms.”

13. Breaking the boundaries between nature and the human • The dog’s 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

14. 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

15. The War’s 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

16. The War’s 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

17. How do they heal themselves • Reading • Mutual support • Memories and story-telling.

18. 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).

19. 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

20. Communication between Hana & EP • Mutual dependence p. 5 • EP’s 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

21. Communication between Hana & Caravaggio • Know each other at home (used to be her “teacher” and her Scarlet Pimpernel. 紅花俠 55) • Caravaggio – p. 29 “I need gelato.” Hana’s 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

22. Memories & Flashbacks • e.g. – Caravaggio’s 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 novel’s fluid narration: Hana's first encounter with Kip 75 -- first from Hana's perspective, then Caravaggio's and then Kip's

23. Memories & Story-telling –leading the listen into his mind and past • EP’s –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.”

24. 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)

25. Communication between Hana & Kip • Her need of his support (103); • His need of her shoulder (114-15) • Intimacy and distance (125 – 27)

26. Next Week • More on Chaps III: Kip’s presence in the Villa and his past; Kip and the English Patient • Chaps IV – VI: Katherine and Almasy