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Sweeping the sands: Geographies of desire in The English Patient
Literature Film Quarterly, 1998 by Sadashige, Jacqui
Do not regret the passing of the camel and the caravan. . . Do not worry that their world or yours has grown too small. Despite its roads, its trucks, its televisions, the Sahara remains unsubdued.
-William Langewiesche, Sahara Unveiled
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I was seduced by The English Patient. It was a rainy autumn afternoon, and I could all but swear that Philadelphia's public radio station played in the background. Someone (quite likely director Anthony Minghella) spoke of filming the then soon-to-be-released feature film The English Patient. He related how it had been necessary to sweep the desert sands each time a scene required shooting or reshooting.2 It is a simple fact of filmmaking that actors, trucks, and cinematic equipment leave tracks. This is no secret. And when you think about it, it becomes pretty obvious that terrain must be cleared and surfaces need retouching in order to create those unmarked and untouched dunes that call to mind "desert," "Sahara," or "Africa" when they appear before our eyes. Despite the demystifying content of the news story, my mind flooded with the image of an endless stretch of sand and felt, all the more poignantly, its transience. So began my romance with The English Patient.
There is, however, a canny self-consciousness that comes with recognizing that a place imbued with longing is merely a trick of the camera. The account of desert cinematography engages even as it undermines the dreamscape of the desert. On the one hand, the reality of desert traffic reminds us how the entire world has become fair game for multinational corporations, film crews, and adventure tourists alike. With phenomena like the annual Antarctic marathon and the recently declared "Visit Myanmar Year" opening up those "final frontiers," one can hardly maintain belief in the existence of a lost or untouched world. Moreover, the example of Myanmar (whose tourist industry is reputedly supported by forced labor) points up exoticism's politically suspect edges. At the same time-like the glossy travel brochures that beckon us to North Africa or television ads replete with tip-toeing hippos and sunken reefs-visions of sand, heat, and desert explorers pander to that secret desire, if not for authentic and untouched places, then for a time in which it was possible and safe to dream about those worlds.
I
Along with authors such as Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Robert Kroetsch, Michael Ondaatje has been counted among Canada's foremost postmodern writers.3 A relentless manipulation of time frame and point of view mark the formal aspects of Ondaatje's style; his prose slips into and between character and narratorial voices, flashing forwards and backwards through memory and history. Furthermore, Ondaatje has consistently sought out "marginal figures out of the historical past," around whose reconstructed lives he structures his works (Heble 97). The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Coming Through Slaughter (1976), In the Skin of a Lion (1987), and, most recently, The English Patient (1992) all comprise, at one level, the fictional histories of historical personages. Even Running in the Family ( 1982), which recounts the author's attempt to uncover and understand the man who was his father, recalls the methodology of his novels. Although it is framed as autobiography, Running in the Family weaves together firsthand reminiscences with events construed from impossible perspectives-for example, his grandmother Lalla's last moments as she drunkenly rides floodwaters through the streets of Nuwara Eliya-in such a way that distinction between historical reconstruction and invention becomes all but impossible, if not meaningless.
Most simply, the appearance of these individuals suggests a habit of method; the centrality of the "reconstituted figure" affords, as it were, a glimpse into Ondaatje's creative process, sometimes revealing a source of inspiration. Ondaatje has claimed that a single image catalyzed The English Patient: "[A] plane crashing in the desert. I wasn't sure who the survivor was . . [the man] who fell burning into the desert" (Slopen 48). And yet one need not turn to the minutes of the Royal Geographical Society in order to find an individual whose life might be re-imagined to accommodate such an image. The fact that Ondaatje employs a similar methodology in recreating the lives of members of his immediate family and in writing the story of Ladislaus de Almasy (the title character of The English Patient) bears significance beyond the curiosity of artistic inspiration. For the imaginative reconstruction of verifiable but hazy personages gives voice to figures who have somehow fallen though the cracks of history. And while Ondaatje does not always chose individuals belonging to historically marginalized or silenced groups, the flesh, blood, stomach, and sweat granted to individuals such as Buddy Bolden (in Coming Through Slaughter) and Ambrose Small (in In the Skin of a Lion) do body forth the other eyes and opinions that Ondaatje identifies as critical to his understanding of history: "I love that sense that history is not just one opinion. I prefer a complicated history where an event is seen through many eyes or emotions, and the writer doesn't try to control the viewpoint" (Slopen 48). In this way, both the interplay of voices within Ondaatje's works and the narratives they comprise as discrete literary projects bring to light the gaps and lapses in the historical record. The very texture of these works produces speculation about the myriad other voices that have been made obscure through the passage of time-and, more importantly, on the processes that have effected those forgettings. Ultimately, the din of voices that make up these works disrupts and denaturalizes narrative unity, teleology, and objectivity specifically in their capacity to construct and legitimize a particular version of history.
