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Sweeping the sands: Geographies of desire in The English Patient
Literature Film Quarterly, 1998 by Sadashige, Jacqui
For Kip, there is no paradox, the answer is clear: intra-Asian difference must bow to "the tremor of Western wisdom." As a result, recognition of the "greater" division separating East from West, white from brown, forces Kip to break off his affair with Hana and leave the villa; the novel's final pages find Kip years later in India, where he and his family "move with ease in their customs and habits" (301). Yet, ironically, Kip's vision of a monolithic Asia-his own brand of orientalism-mirrors the erotics of Hana's affair with him. When Hana gazes at Kip, "[s]he imagines all of Asia through the gestures of this one man. The way he lazily moves, his quiet civilisation" (217). The lyricism of Ondaatje's prose style here and elsewhere lulls the reader into embracing racial difference, to glimpse the sexiness of that formulation. The seductive edge of Hana's orientalism extends beyond the boundaries of her imagination, for it is a quality made sexy through the mechanics of language and the medium of the novel. There is, likewise, a terrible beauty in a phrase like "the hurricane of heat withering bodies as it meets them"-more beautiful, perhaps, than the appeal of any woman. Thus The English Patient ultimately plays out desire's place in history and narrative in two directions. In the first place, the desires of its characters emerge from the particular circumstances of their selves as gendered, nationalized, racialized, and textualized subjects. Desire, in short, is inseparable from the particularities of its subjects; characters such as Hana, Caravaggio, and Almasy might view their choices as reactions against the structures that categorize them as wife, explorer, brown, or white, but the rise and fall of Kip and Hana's affair makes clear the mutually constitutive relationships among history, textuality, and desire. Further, the narrative power of Ondaatje's writing-its ability to direct our sympathies first in this way and then its opposite-underlines the present urgency of those same forces: the enduring myths of racial difference, transgression, and the private self. Is Kip the hero of the novel? Yes, in this instance, but he is made heroic because we can imagine all of Asia through the gestures of this one man.
II
I was seduced by The English Patient. But if visions of untouched sands drew me from across the airwaves, then I was betrayed in the darkness of the theater. As in the account of desert filming, Ondaatje's novel derives much of its power from its canny ability to seduce and demystify all at once-what one might call the embodiment of postmodern longing. Ondaatje achieves this effect though a manipulation of form and content; and in adapting The English Patient to film, screenwriter and director Anthony Minghella has effected changes in both areas. In simple formal terms, Minghella provides his film with a narrative focus; Count Almasy (Ralph Fiennes) becomes the central character, and his story-in particular the retelling of his affair with Katharine Clifton-organizes the film's structure. The way in which this structural shift affects the film's meaning can be seen by examining two mutually reinforcing strategies: the radical change in dramatic climax and the introduction of closure to the patient's life along with the fixing of his identity.
