Heart of Darkness and The English Patient

Points of similarity

1. Our pilgrim makes a perilous journey to a foreign location.

(HD): “I got my appointment – of course; and I got it very quick. It appears the company had received news that one of their captains had been killed in a scuffle with the natives. This was my chance, and it made me the more anxious to go”(6).

“Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances” (30).

(EP: “You will need a pass of course. We can probably get someone to drive you up. It is still terrible out there. Dead cattle. Horses shot dead, half eaten. People hanging upside down from bridges. The last vices of the war. Completely unsafe (29).) Caravaggio takes the train to Florence, and walks four miles from the village to the villa.

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2. The pilgrim seeks a man of mystery.

(HD) “’ In the interior you will no doubt meet Mr. Kurtz.’ On my asking who Mr. Kurtz was, he said he was a first-class agent; and seeing my disappointment at this information, he added slowly, laying down his pen, ‘He is a very remarkable person’” (16)

“”Tell me, pray,’ said I, ‘who is this Mr. Kurtz’” (22).

(EP) “He needs to know who this Englishman from the desert is, and reveal him for Hana’s sake” (117).

3. The pilgrim arrives at his destination to find the mystery man living in a building that is derelict, half-destroyed with holes in the roof.

(HD: “A long decaying building”…”half-burned in the high grass; the large holes in the peaked roof gaped black from afar….” (86)

(EP: “From outside the place seemed devastated.” (14) It had the “look of a besieged fortress” (43) with “half-bombed gardens” (86), “Some rooms faced onto the valley with no walls at all. She would open a door and see just a sodden bed huddled against a corner, covered with leaves. Doors opened into landscape. Some rooms had become an open aviary. The staircase had lost its lower steps….” (13)

where Kurtz’s hut is surrounded by heads on stakes, the villa is surrounded by statues without heads and limbs (EP 43)

4. The man of mystery is also a foreigner, of mixed nationality. He is educated partly in England. (HD 83, EP 165)

(HD: “His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz….” (83)

EP: (he is “an international bastard” (176)

5. The mystery man fascinates everyone around him. He is of uncertain morality. Gifted intellectually, he is known for his speaking skills. He recites poetry, yet he is “little more than a voice” (HD 80).

(HD: “The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence was his ability to talk, his words – the gift of expression…” (79). “You ought to have heard him recite poetry – his own too it was, he told me. Poetry!” (103)

(EP “…he talks, he talks all the time….” (28). “He rambled on, driving them mad….He speaks in fragments about oasis towns, thee later Medicos, the prose style of Kipling, the woman who bit into his flesh.( 96) Recites Christopher Smart (21)

6. He is also a skilled writer and has had a piece of work published in an international journal.

(HD: “…the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had entrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it too. I’ve seen it. I’ve read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence….” (83).

(EP: 134 writes for the Geographical Society in London)

7. The mystery man is so ill that he looks like a carving of death.

(HD: Kurtz is described as “an animated image of death carved out of old ivory “ (97).

(EP: “…in the arbor room that is his bedroom, he reposes like the sculpture of the dead knight in Ravenna” (96).

8. His nurse is another foreigner.

(HD: the Russian “had managed to nurse Kurtz through two illnesses….” (91)

(EP: Hanna, the Canadian nurses the English patient.

9. The mystery man “goes native”

(HD: “nerves went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites…” (83)

(EP: lived among the Bedouin, become “nameless” where “it was easy for me to slip across borders, not to belong to anyone, to any nation” (139).

10. There is a guidebook, also mysterious, in which the text is annotated with personal reflections, so that the authorized account is challenged by personal experience.

(HD: “It had lost its covers and the pages had been thumbed into a state of extremely dirty softness; but the back had been lovingly stitched afresh with white cotton thread, which looked clean yet. It was an extraordinary find…. I handled this amazing antiquity with the greatest possible tenderness, lest is should dissolve in my hands…. Such a book being there was wonderful enough; but still more astounding were the notes penciled in the margin, and plainly referring to the text.” (65-66) (An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship, by Towson. “with illustrative diagrams and repulsive tables of figures…” (65)

(EP: “And in his commonplace book, his 1890 edition of Herodotus’ Histories, are other fragments, - maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books. “ (96) “…his guidebook, ancient and modern, of supposed lies. When he discovered the truth to what had seemed a lie, he brought out his glue pot and pasted in a map or news clipping….” (246).

11. The pilgrim and the mystery man have characteristics in common.

(HD: “the same people who sent him [Kurtz] specially also recommended you [Marlow]” (47).

(EP: Caravaggio and Almasy are both spies. Caravaggio “worked with intelligence out of Cairo and Italy for a while. Till he was captured” (169).

12. similarities of geography

HD: “…you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert….” (59)

EP: “In the desert it is easy to lose a sense of demarcation. When I came out of the air and crashed into the desert, into those troughs of yellow, all I kept thinking was, I must build a raft…I must build a raft….These were water people. Even today caravans look like a river” (18-19).

Why would Ondaatje do a “riff” on Conrad’s book? Is he paying it homage? Or critiquing it? Why make Caravaggio Marlow, Almasy into Kurtz, Hana into the Russian ? Well, how are the two novels different?

Homage or subversion?:

• On one level, Ondaatje is paying homage to Conrad’s novel in his retelling of it:

“The nineteenth century was an age of river seekers. And then in the 1920s there is a sweet postscript history on this pocket of earth, made mostly by privately funded expeditions and followed by modest lectures given at the Geographical Society in London at Kensington Gore. These lectures are given by sunburned, exhausted men who, like Conrad’s sailors, are not too comfortable with the etiquette of taxis, the quick, flat wit of bus conductors” (EP 133).

• Conrad’s critique of British imperialism and the exploitation of the nameless other is a theme which is central to Ondaatje’s politics regarding the desert:

“The desert could not be claimed or owned – it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names, long before Canterbury existed, long before battles treaties quilted Europe and the East….All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into the landscape” (139).

• initially, English patient disavows the heroic myth: “All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps”(261)
• he moves in “ancient time,”(246) trying to find the sites mentioned by Herodotus; like H.D., he seems to inhabit all times

Looking for the lost army of Cambyses. Looking for Zerzura. 1932 and 1933 and 1934. Not seeing each other for months. Just the Bedouin and us, crisscrossing the Forty Days Road. There were rivers of desert tribes, the most beautiful humans I’ve met in my life. We were German, English, Hungarian, Africa – all of us insignificant to them. Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states” (138).

· yet to be without a national identity is not be identity-less – he is part of a community

· English patient steps into heroic myth when he meets Katherine Clifton

· Fisher King myth, Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere

· Katherine brings him to consciousness: “[he] had not looked at himself like this in a mirror for year” (153) and he becomes curious about the shape of his face”… his “long eyebrows”… “the beginning of grey in his sandy hair”(152).

· Like Kurtz who declares “My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river…”(85), the Englishman changes, becoming proprietary and jealous, referring to Katherine’s body part as “my shoulder”(156).

· he begins to see Katherine as a piece of land to colonize, mimicking the “deal makers”. The contract makers. The map drawers” (284) who see history as linear, imagine that they can control the landscape (cf. Eldorado Mining Company in Heart of Darkness.

· enters the Cave of Swimmers – archetypal place of the Great Mother

· as Grail knight, he asks the wrong question. – when captured by the English, he “didn’t give them a right name”(25).

· when he falls, on fire, from the plane into the desert, he lands in a radically changed world – symbolized by destruction of Renaissance trompe l’oiel mural in the villa

· destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a waste land – failure to find the Great Mother and locate the feminine, generative principle

The English Patient is also a subversion of critique of Conrad’s position

· In Heart of Darkness , the European identity is based on the presence of the colonized, speechless “savage”. In The English Patient, the explores see themselves as insignificant and Africa as

“a place where there were sudden, brief populations over the centuries – a fourteenth-century army, a Tebu caravan, the Senussi raiders of 1915. and in between these times – nothing was there”(141).

• recognition of the subject position of Africans
• inhabitants have knowledge Westerns lack, such as the healer who makes the unguent for the English patient’s burns.
• In Heart of Darkness, the English define themselves by projecting the dark side of their own characters onto the “other” and the darkness. And yet that darkness can never be integrated into English society.
• The sexual, the chaotic – that “precise behaviour” that Kip once admired (283) - everything which doesn’t fit into the European ideals is pushed onto the darkness of Africa, the women and the local inhabitants.
• Marlow constructs binaries of jungle vs civilization; Africa vs Europe, savage vs. English speaker, oblivion of darkness vs. knowable order of world of reason
• In The English Patient, the darkness is no longer in the centre of the earth, but brought to the surface, literally in English patient, who is “pure carbon”(109), “burned into the colour of aubergine” (4) –

Hana and Kip speak

Hana

· neither the seductive nor terrifying Amazon on the bank staring at Marlow, nor the virginal, but nameless Intended.

• has lovers,
• conceives a child
• grieves her father’s death, the loss of her baby and the death of the young soldiers.
• unlike the women of HD, whom Marlow believes “should be out of it”, Hana is in the middle of it
• challenges the quest’s objectification of women
• challenges the quest’s objectives

Kip

• superficially, analogue to Marlow’s loyal helmsmen, the silent pilot, but Kip speaks
• Fledderus sees Kip as Grail knight (i.e. analogous to Marlow), but I disagree.

· Hana does make Kip into a heroic figure as means of establishing order:

“each morning he would step from the painted scene towards dark bluffs of chaos. The knight. the warrior saint”(273).

· Kip rejects this role:

“If he were a hero in a painting, he could claim a just sleep […]. The successful defusing of a bomb ended novels. Wise white fatherly men shook hands, were acknowledge, and limped away, having been coaxed out of solitude for this special occasion. But he was a professional. And he remained the foreigner, the Sikh” (104-5).

· rejects the heroic rule because it does not include the “brown races”; also recognizes the inadequacy of the myth – need a ware to be a hero.

· novel’s predictable plot line fails to account for the complexity of his experience

· recognizes order as transient

· finds solace in art, largely of late medieval period, Christian theme

· Arezzo, sees frescoes in Chiesa de San Francisco, by Piero della Francesca; Francesca was first Renaissance painter to use single point perspective

· frescoes illustrate medieval tale: The Golden Legend – history of wood used for Christ’s crucifixion. wood believed to originate with tree of original sin in Garden of Eden; chopped down by King Solomon to build bridge; Queen of Sheba, learning of origins of wood on the bridge, refuses to cross it. King Solomon orders the bridge removed and the wood buried; the wood is later found and used for Christ’s crucifixion; returns to Jerusalem 600 years AD.

·

· For Kip, the medieval world provides a cushion against the war:

It was always raining and cold, and there was no order but for the great maps of art that showed judgment, piety, and sacrifice. The Eighth Army came upon river after river of destroyed bridges, and their sapper units clambered down banks on ladders of rope within enemy gunfire and swam or waded across. Food and tents were washed away. Men who were tied to equipment disappeared. Once across the river they tried to ascend out of the water. They sank their hands and wrists into the mud wall of the cliff face and hung there. They wanted the mud to harden and hold them.

The young Sikh sapper put his cheek against the mud and thought of the Queen of Sheba’s face, the texture of her skin. There was no comfort in this river except for his desire for her, which somehow kept him warm He would pull the veil off her hair. He would put his right hand between her neck and olive blouse….

….He leaned forward to rest on the skin of her frail neck. He fell in love with her downcast eye. This woman who would someday know the sacredness of bridges ( 70).

• fresco reflects a world view that privileges relational qualities
• in Naples, defusing a bomb, Kip finds comfort in the church of San Giovanni a Carbonara amongst the terracotta figures of a woman and an angel:

…if he is going to explode he will do so in the company of these two. They will die or be secure. There is nothing more he can do, anyway, He has been up all night on a final search for caches of dynamite and time cartridges. Walls will crumble around him or he will walk through a city of light. At least he has found these parental figures. He can relax in the midst of this mime of conversation” (280).

• della Francesca painting of the Madonna del parto [the pregnant Madonna]
• Madonna figure in Gabicce, witnessing the Marine Festival of the Virgin Mary (78-80) – mixture of pagan celebration of the Stella Maris with Christian reverence for Mary
• re-enactment of the emergence of the Virgin from the sea – bringing forward of the feminine principle from the sea as source into communal consciousness
• reader is seemingly invited to identify with the Japanese victims of the bomb and the “savages” of earlier imperialism as Kip finds a new, post-colonial identity:

When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you’re an Englishman. You had King Leopold of Belgium and now you have fucking Harry Truman of the USA. You all learned it from the English” (286).

· but Ondaatje interrogates this easy association: who are the English?

• great irony of the novel is that the English patient, who represents everything which Kip once revered and comes to despise, is not even English. ; most convincing Englishman is likely a Hungarian
• more than postcolonial critique of Conrad’s text. Instead of ‘us and them,’ we get a community of individuals holed up at the Villa. Binaries are undermined as traitors versus nomads versus explores versus nurses
• asks the question, “who was the enemy?” , who are we? How do we know? What is home?
• Where Marlow is called back from the chaos, the darkness of oblivion, the characters in The English Patient are called back not by order, but by the love of human relationships. Kip says to himself one day, “Only Hardy, he realized, keeps me human now” (216) and when Hardy is killed, he thinks, “If he could walk across the room and touch her he would be sane.” ( 113).

· Caravaggio wants to save Hana, “She needed an uncle” (85). While Hana thinks that she is nursing the English patient, he gets her to read to him so that she will come out of her shell shock.

· instead of single, wounded Fisher King, have four traumatized individuals

· get multiple perspectives that problematize notions of gender, race, and nation

· villa is a liminal space that allows challenging of existing categories and world views

· Ondaatje in interview with Eleanor Wachtel:

the villa “was an Eden, an escape, a little cul-de-sac during the war, and this was where healing began. Then with the news of other bombs, suddenly this became, perhaps, the Last Eden 252).

· in villa, heroic myth is exposed as inadequate for contemporary life in its single point perspective, focus on the goal

· alternative is communal, relational orientation :

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience” ( 261).

• Suggests identity comes from relationships (261) – from interdependence.

Post-colonialism

· Theoretical strategies used to examine the culture of former colonies of the European empires and their relation to the rest of the world

· argues that the literary products of a colonized nation use language of the colonizer and therefore do not represent the reality of the indigenous people, but rather the influence and power relationships of the colonizers

· colonizer constructs sense of self as ‘centre’ as opposed to ‘other’

· binary of centre and margin

· focus on development of authentic voice outside

Post-modernism

· theorizing of culture post 1960

· absence of meaning and significance

· idea of progress (scientific, historical) questioned

· no totalizing narrative; there is no one, all-encompassing narrative of progress

· instead, see metanarratives

· questions construction of nation, gender, race, sexuality

· proposes existence of ‘margin’ and ‘centre’ rather than homogeneity

· loss of contact with nature and the real

· reliance on technology so difficult to find boundaries between technology and human

· identified by what we consume rather than by what we make

· self-reflexivity and loss of subjectivity

· feel like we have multiple identities that arise from our environments

· no transcendent ideals that sustain us

· response to culture obsessed with media messages and images

· death of history

· fascination with nostalgia films as means of connecting to a ‘past’

· intertextuality – references to films, texts, music, art of past; embrace of popular forms (detective fiction, science fiction, fiary tale, journalism, neo-Gothic

· Art is generally fragmented, parodic, devoid of theme

· lack of originality

· pastiche – old styles referenced, but with irony; delight in verbal pyrotechnics, artifice

· irony used to undermine conventions

· mixing of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture; interest in effects of mass culture;

· global culture

In an interview with Eleanor Wachtel, Ondaatje says:

“I don’t believe stories are told from A to Z anymore; or, if they are, they become very ponderous. I’m used to commercial breaks….That sense of discovery, of memory, and how we reveal ourselves to each other – none of that is chronological. Hana will read twenty pages of a book to the poor Patient, and then she’ll read on to herself, then carry on aloud twenty pages later, and he’s utterly lost the plot. I like that” (258).

Is The English Patient a modernist or post-modernist novel?