Textual Hauntings: Narrating History, Memory, and Silence in the English Patient (2004)

[T]rauma opens up and challenges us to a new kind of listening, witnessing, precisely, of impossibility. --Cathy Caruth In 1996, Anthony Minghella's cinematic adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient enthralls movie-goers with its romantic tale of a desert explorer's tragic love affair at commencement of World War II. The following year success of this film, particularly this character, in capturing cultural imagination of at least its US audience is evident when it wins nine Academy Awards. In many reviews and discussions surrounding both Minghella's film and Ondaatje's book, primary emphasis is given to its title character. For example, Rufus Cook, in Being and Representation in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, describes patient as the character who has most completely developed his human potentialities (45). Whether it is due to romantic portrayal of patient (in both his cinematic and literary forms), or fact that is titlular character, most readings of this text accept patient's epistemology as center around which book moves. (1) But is it? The primary evidence for these claims is provocative challenge patient's narrative of memory poses to general concept of history. But, what if we questioned these assumptions and responses to patient more rigorously? What might we uncover instead? What more could we learn about telling of history? Arguably, The English Patient confronts reader not just with experience of personal trauma, but also with trauma of European History-with silenced voices erased from narrative of past, represented particularly in character of Kip. By first reading politics of patient's narrative of memory, this essay then examines how ghosts that lie in margins of this narrative create a textual haunting that raises questions about any narration of cultural trauma. Theorizing what I call a spectral narrative economy, I analyze how Ondaatje's novel contributes to contemporary debates on nature of history and historiography by asking for present to reconsider text of history from place of silence. A Narration of Memory Traumatized by past, characters of this novel seek to cope with their traumatic experience by drawing event a narrative space that will contain and position past. In particularly, it is patient's conjuring of memory that organizes narrative of text as he whispers again, dragging listening heart of young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, that well of memory kept plunging during those months before died (4). This passage figures dynamics of text's narrative movement. The patient's remembering propels narrative and other characters with him into well of memory. Hence, his remembering functions at two levels in novel: structuring his own discourse in story, as well as narrative as a whole. The circular and repetitious movement of his recounting is replicated at level of entire text. His recounting of past puts memory circulation within narrative of text as his stories slip from level to level like a hawk (4). Memory moves text forward, draws in characters around him, and leads to a further unfolding of his own memories and those of other characters. As patient returns to past to reveal events that have led him to lie in this bed, each act of remembering instigates other revelations, creating a proliferation of memory which neither his narrative nor text as whole can channel any linear framework. (2) However, splinters of memory that make up narrative of The English Patient and fragments of images and sentences that compose these memories do not provide a clearly defined representation of past. Describing his years in Cairo, patient remembers: When I went back desert, I took with me evenings of dancing to 78 of Souvenirs in bars, women pacing like greyhounds, leaning against you while you muttered their shoulders during My Sweet. …