Sweeping the sands: Geographies of desire in The English Patient

Anthony Minghella originally saw in Ondaatje's novel the opportunity to present a "kind of catalog of loves-love of country, a nurse's love for a patient, innocent romantic love, and the catastrophic love at the heart of it all" (qtd. in Thomson 44). And while he does manage to include all these loves in one form or another, Minghella's "catalogue of loves" ultimately produces an essentialized notion of love that is exemplified by Almasy's affair with Katharine. Furthermore, as seen in Minghella's treatment of both Herodotus's Histories and Almasy's politics, the film version of The English Patient is marked by an insistent treatment of love and, in particular, heterosexual romance as nearly constitutive of subjectivity. Whereas Ondaatje's treatment of his characters suggests that there are multiple subjectivities located in myriad and simultaneous loyalties to structures such as family, nation, and race, Minghella's film constructs and fetishizes an essential interior self. The individual, here, exists as something to be uncovered, even rescued, from surfaces like body and place, and true identity is constituted by or recovered through the memory of particular acts and their motivations. More specifically, the film implies that selfhood is located in a person's ability to love and is evidenced by acts inspired by such sentiments. As a result, the "lover" emerges as the true subject-set against the fleeting and mutable identities associated with race or nationality.

In the way that Minghella has reorganized various subplots and characters around the figure of Almasy, he has likewise pressed into service geographical and other non-narrative passages from the text of the novel. For example, a catalogue of winds that Almasy has added to his volume of Herodotus becomes in the film, like the tale of Gyges and Candaules, a virtual declaration of love. While Katharine and Almasy sit trapped in a vehicle during a sandstorm, he utters, "[L]et me tell you about winds. There is a whirlwind from Southern Morocco, the Aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives" (Minghella 73). This is the first time we see Almasy attempting to communicate with Katharine. Minghella's reworking of the passage, and indeed the very use of meteorology and ethnography as a means of courtship, suggests not so much the indeterminacy of that discourse as the fundamental nature of the romantic and/or erotic. Almasy's solicitous catalogue reveals how readily even the non-narrative can be made into love stories. On a slightly different note, the Cave of Swimmers-evidence that cultures preexist their discovery and inscription by the West-is marked, so an "ancient Arab" tells Almasy, by "a mountain in the shape of a woman's back."12 The old man speaks in Arabic, and Almasy mutters an English translation to himself. But the men are able to communicate through the shared experience of the eroticized female body, suggesting that human bodies and human sexuality possess an essence more fundamental than the land itself. And although Almasy idealistically imagines that an earth without maps would allow for the transcendence of structures such as the family and the nation, the opening and closing shots of the film reveal that, without maps, the desert ripples with dunes that mimic the curved surfaces of human flesh.