"Call Me By My Name": Personal identity and possession in The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient and the 1996 Anthony Minghella film that was adapted from it deal with how we as individuals identify ourselves and how we identify others. What names do we ascribe to people, and what boundaries do those names create in our lives? These contemporary themes are explored against the backdrop of the years leading up to and following the Second World War, where the wrong name could prove to be very dangerous when spoken in the wrong land. Almasy insists on naming and describing Katharine in terms of the desert, while she firmly defines herself by her "Britishness." As Count Almasy loses Katharine by misnaming her, we see the tragic effect of his possessive love of a woman unwilling to compromise her own definition of herself.

Count Lazlo de Almasy, as the Hungarian who hungers for the British and married Katharine Clifton, dismisses all boundaries: national, societal, and patriarchal. He often speaks of his disdain for the restrictions imposed by nations and family names. "I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states" (Ondaatje 138). Almasy goes onto describe his desire to do away with his own name in the presence of the desert: "I didn't want my name against such beautiful names. Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert" (139). Almasy loses himself in the desert, which he feels is a holy place, which can never be owned or named:

The desert could not be claimed or owned-it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stories, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battled and treaties quilted Europe and the East ... It was a place of faith. We disappeared into the landscape. (138-39)

Despite feeling this way, Almasy is on a mapping expedition, which defines boundaries and lines of ownership. It is perhaps his inability to reconcile these two attitudes that lead to his crimes later in the novel. Almasy shifts nationalities throughout the course of the story; he is originally Hungarian, but is thought at some times to be British, at other times, German. He speaks several languages; he cares not for loyalty to country, his one desire being to map the desert that so captivates him. "I wanted to erase my name and the place I had come from. By the time the war had arrived, after ten years in the desert, it was easy for me to slip across borders, not to belong to anyone, to any nation" (139). He had no desire to possess anything or to ally himself with anyone at this point in his life, but this changes when he meets Katharine Clifton.

Katharine Clifton first meets Count Almasy in the desert, as her husband, Geoffery, joins the exploration team. The Count and Katharine become lovers, and the love they share crosses the boundaries that constrict them: "His [Almasy's] hunger wishes to burn down all social rules, all courtesy" (155). Therefore it is no wonder that their relationship begins and ends in the desert, a place with ill-defined boundaries far away from society and its constraints.

The two lovers are quite different from one another, and both are uncompromising in their characteristics. Almasy spends most of his time and even allies himself with the desert, a place of intense heat and dryness, which are, historically, characteristics of masculinity. Katherine, however, is quite the opposite. She is constantly described as a moist, wet creature, characteristics of femininity. She loves Almasy despite these differences, and tries to understand what it means to her lover.

She was a woman who had grown up ... among moistness. Her passion for the desert was temporary. She'd come to love its sternness because of him, wanting to understand his comfort in its solitude. She was always happier in rain, in bathrooms steaming with liquid air... (170)

The film describes Katherine's moistness through the words of her husband, Geoffery: "She's in love with the hotel plumbing. She's either in the swimming pool-she swims for hours, she's a fish, quite incredible-or she's in the bath" (Minghella 46). These differences are explored visually as Katherine washes Almasy's hair in his bathroom. Here she attempts to draw Almasy into her "moist" world, but she is unsuccessful. As the film progresses, Almasy sucks away Katherine's moisture, little by little. After an intensely passionate encounter with Almasy, Katherine pleads with her husband: "Can't we really go home? I can't breathe. [I'm] dying for green, anything green, or rain" (94). The desert (Almasy) is beginning to take its toll on her body.

Possessed lands are often referred to in terms of the female body, and The English Patient explores this practice with the central image of the desert:

There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own. Some old Arab poet's woman, whose white-dove shoulders made him describe an oasis with her name. (140-41)

Count Almasy echoes these practices when talking about Katharine saying, "How do I explain her to you? With the use of my hands? The way I can arc out in the air the shape of a mesa or rock?" (235). Almasy even finds it difficult to write with Katharine on his mind: "The fear of describing her presence as I wrote caused me to burn down all sentiment, all rhetoric of love. Still, I described the desert as purely as I would have spoken of her" (241). The film translates these themes into visual imagery as Almasy discovers the Cave of Swimmers, which is surrounded by rocks "in the shape of a woman's back." His equation of Katharine with the desert produces some of the film's most striking images. When Almasy enters the Cave of Swimmers, he examines an indentation in the rock that fits his fingers (fig. 1), an image repeated as he examines the hollow at the base of Katharine's neck (fig. 2). The desert that is so central to the novel and the film is the Libyan Desert, which has more sand dunes than any other desert on earth. Almasy refers to "the deserts of Libya" as "the loveliest phrase I know" (Ondaatje 257). The dunes are the desert's most picturesque feature, and are shown at the beginning and end of the film, clearly an image reminiscent of the hollow in Katharine's neck (fig. 3). It is also of interest to note that sand dunes are considered to be very dangerous to cross, and desert travel routes avoid them completely. In his affair with Katherine, Almasy even ignores the law of the desert, a place he held in the deepest respect.