Postmodernist elements în The English Patient

Postmodernism is a complicated term, or set of ideas, one that has only emerged as an area of academic study since the mid-1980s. Postmodernism is hard to define, because it is a concept that appears in a wide variety of disciplines or areas of study, including art, architecture, music, film, literature, sociology, communications, fashion, and technology. It's hard to locate it temporally or historically, because it's not clear exactly when postmodernism begins (Klages 1). Many theorists have tried to come up with a definition of this term, but none seems to have come even close to comprising all its characteristics. Others have tried to find out how postmodernism can be understood, as a larger phenomenon, and to put forward some kind of a list, consisting of the dichotomies between modernism and postmodernism. Such a theorist is Ihab Hassan, on whose article, "Toward a Concept of Postmodernism", I started working with the desire of identifying elements characteristic of postmodernism in Michael Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient.

Before allowing myself to get caught in the intricate web of postmodernist elements that can be identified in Ondaatje's book, first I would like to clarify the reasons which made me choose this specific work as a basis for my project. I must confess that I saw Anthony Minghella's film before having read the book. I found myself in an unusual situation, as I usually prefer reading the book first and watching the movie afterwards. I was enthralled with its romantic tale of a desert explorer's tragic love affair, and audiences around the world seemed to share my opinion, since the movie was finally awarded nine Academy Awards (Novak 1). This project offered me the opportunity of reading the book and making a comparison between the written version and the cinematic adaptation. After having read it, I came to the conclusion that both the novel and the movie managed to give life to Ondaatje's ideas about the importance of exploring a variety of cultures and mingling present and past in richly evocative prose.

Michael Ondaatje's novel takes place as the Second World War is ending. It explores the lives of four people, a young woman and three men, who are stranded in a damaged villa north of Florence as the war retreats around them. In an upstairs room lies the badly burned English patient, alive but unable to move. His extraordinary adventures and turbulent love affair in the North African desert before the War provide the focus around which the vivid tales of his companions revolve.

I chose Ihab Hassan's essay--"Toward a Concept of Postmodernism"--as basis for my project because of the way in which he manages to approach postmodernism and to evoke its characteristic elements, using complex and specific terms without distancing himself from the simpler, uninitiated reader. He in fact comes up with several definitions: "postmodernism seems a contested signifier floating in a field of hype" (1); "the equivocal autobiography of an age, a mode of collective, sometimes chaotic, sometimes mocking, self-reflection" (2); "a continual exercise in self-definition" (2); "a cultural and artistic phenomenon" whose "mercurial character" was subsumed by his own earlier neologism "Indetermanence" ("indeterminacies" + "immanences") (2); an age of radical spiritual privations (1), "an arid land we all need to traverse" (152-53). He also comes up with "certain schematic differences from modernism" (151), but I will only retain the Postmodernist elements here:

Postmodernism

Pataphysics/Dadaism

Antiform (disjunctive, open)

Play

Chance

Anarchy

Exhaustion/Silence

Process/Performance/Happening

Participation

Decreation/Deconstruction

Antithesis

Absence

Dispersal

Text/Intertext

Rhetoric

Syntagm

Parataxis

Metonymy

Combination

Rhizome/Surface

Against Interpretation/Misreading

Signifier

Scriptible (Writerly)

Anti-narrative/Petite Histoire

Idiolect

Desire

Mutant

Polymorphous/Androgynous

Schizophrenia

Difference-Differance/Trace

The Holy Ghost

Irony

Indeterminacy

Immanence (152).

I will not deal with all these elements in my paper--since they are to be found "in many fields - rhetoric, linguistics, literary theory, philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, political science, even theology" (Hassan 152)--, but I will focus on those which seem to me to be the most easily reachable when considering The English Patient: Antiform, Anti-narrative/Petite Histoire, Anarchy, Idiolect, Text/Intertext, Irony.

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester: Manchester UP. 1995

Hassan, Ihab. "Toward a Concept of Postmodernism". The Postmodern Turn. Columbus: Ohio State UP. 1987

Hutcheon, Linda. "Theorizing the Postmodern". Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader. Ed. K. M. Newton. 2nd Ed. New York: St Martin's Press. 1997

---. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Jameson, Fredric. "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism". Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader. Ed. K. M. Newton. 2nd Ed. New York: St Martin's Press. 1997

Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. London: Clays Ltd. 1992

Brock University. John Lye. Some Attributes of Post-Modernist Literature. 1999. 8 January 2008

<www.brocku.ca/english/courses/2F55/post-mod attrib.html>

Colorado University. Mary Klages. Postmodernism. January 2007. 8 January 2008

<http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html>

Questia. Amy Novak. Textual Hauntings: Narrating History, Memory, and Silence in The English Patient. 22 June 2004. 8 January 2008

< http://www.questia.com/read/5006516659>

Sparknotes. Beth Schonmuller. SparkNote on The English Patient. 8 January 2008

<http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/englishpatient/>