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The other task that sophisticated reading asks of you is enlightenment, to be aware of what the author is doing, to notice the ways that the author is trying to beguile you, to be able to stand apart from the beguilement, to be aware of other more difficult paths through the text, some of which the novelist has prepared for adventurous readers, others that he or she may not even be aware of.

These two tasks are not exactly compatible: in order to experience the novel's world fully, you can't always be thinking analytically about the narrative devices, the play with language and the significance of images. And in order to think analytically, you can't let yourself be wholly taken in by the narrative. The best way to do this--especially early in your interpretive careers--is to read the novel twice, marking things that seem puzzling or interesting or unusual the first time through, then analyzing them the second time. You don't often have the luxury to reread, though, so you might have to learn to do both incompatible things at once.

Michael Ondaatje's English Patient is a good novel to practice this double-edged reading on. The novel is as beguiling as the best of them: written in an amazingly rich and sensuous prose, filled with evocative detail, set in an exotic locale and peopled with engaging characters. But the novel also attempts to enlighten you even while it's beguiling you. It enlightens you by referring repeatedly and in several different ways to what it is and what it is doing: that is, the novel refers to novels and novelists, to the act of reading, to books as physical objects. So, lets look at these two parallel responses or tasks in the reading of Ondaatje's novel.

First, The English Patient beguiles the reader with an extraordinary sensuality. By this I don't only mean that the novel is erotic, but that it "makes you feel as if you can feel something." Here is the first page-and-a-half of the novel: [quotation, p. 3 to middle of 4]

The burned body belongs to "the english patient," so called because he claims not to know who he is, except that he's English. He has been a desert explorer in North Africa in the years before the second World War. He was rescued from a burning plane wreck in the desert by Bedoin, who treated his burns and eventually turned him over to an Allied hospital, with which he then travels up through Italy as the Allies follow the German retreat. The young woman is a Canadian nurse, Hana, who has been psychologically scarred by her experience of her patients' lonely and painful deaths. Hana and the English Patient have remained in a deserted villa overlooking Florence, refusing to move with the advancing army.

The english patient and Hana are joined by Caravaggio, a former thief who has spied for the allies. He knew Hana as a child and has come to her in the villa to comfort her after her father's death in the war, as well as to be comforted, since his thumbs have been amputed by enemy torturers, and because he has lost his nerve, a thief's most important quality. They are also joined by Kip, a Sikh soldier who has volunteered for bomb disposal duty. He is assigned to clear mines from the area around the villa. He seems equipped by race for his work and he loses himself in the puzzles of each mine's mechanism. He seems to enjoy the work and its danger, but he has lost many friends to the bombs and mines they are assigned to disarm. While living at the villa, Kip and Hana become lovers.

[Incidentally, Ondaatje himself is of South Asian descent. He was born in Sri Lanka in 1943 of mixed Dutch, Tamil and Sinhalese origins. He moved with his mother to England when he was 10 and to Canada, where he still lives, writes and teaches, when he was 19.]

Ondaatje's sensuality in the novel is focused on the characters' contact with ambiguous surfaces: with the surfaces of bodies and with the surface of the earth. Kip reads his surroundings for signs of hidden danger and when he finds a mine, reads its casing and wires for hints about the character of the bomb's inventor and the traps that such a person might have set for him. Hana reads her patient's bodies for the signs of death so that she can usher them across that barrier.

And all of the characters attempt to read each others' war-scarred and death-numbed bodies, but particularly the English Patient's body which bears no trace of his previous identity. Caravaggio charts his veins as they both escape into a morphine high. Caravaggio believes that the English Patient is really a german count who put his knowledge of the desert to work for the germans during the war, and he increases his dose of morphine to coax the truth from him.

For Hana, her last patient becomes a substitute for her father, who has died burned and alone only miles from Hana without her knowledge. And for Kip, the patient's black surface mirrors Kip's own dark skin; his nationlessness resonates for Kip, who is himself far from home and his own people, cleaning up after a European, a white-man's war. So, each character projects a different identity onto the english patient: each has a different way of making his ambiguous surface meaningful.

The novel's sensual play of surfaces is particularly affecting in descriptions of lovers. The narrator describes the english patient's memories of his lover: "Their bodies had met in perfumes, in sweat, frantic to get under that thin film with a tongue or a tooth, as if they each could grip character there and during love pull it right off the body of the other" (173). Hana wants to understand who Kip essentially is. The narrator gives us her thoughts: "There isn't a key to him. Everywhere she touches braille doorways. As if organs, the heart, the rows of ribs, can be seen under the skin" (270). The surface of the body is the place where desire gets played out--not just physical desire, but desire for closeness to another person, for intimate knowledge of an identity that is wholly other. As close as Ondaatje's characters get, this desire is always frustrated and can get no deeper than the surface. The narrator even admits that he can't fully understand Hana, that he can't read beyond the surface of his own character.

From the english patient's recollections, we learn about his affair with the wife of an English explorer. This affair is played out and ends upon the ambiguous surface of the desert. His passion for uncovering the mysteries of the desert is another of the novel's attempts to read the significance of an ambiguous surface. Using ancient texts and the oral histories of the desert tribes and aerial reconnaissance, the explorer had sought lost cities and civilizations. But the desert is a surface that is always being wiped clean. Any attempt to write a nation onto this surface will fail. Attempts by the combatants in the war to stake out territory in the desert are ultimately futile. It is another surface that resists the imposition of meaning.

So: Physically evocative descriptions of these geographic and bodily surfaces are a big part of the novel's beguilement, and the reader easily succumbs to the pleasures of the text. The novel itself describes this experience beautifully. The previous quotation from the first pages of the novel describes Hana being pulled into a story: the english patient "drag[s] the listening heart of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is..." (4). And a few pages later, there's another image of the experience of beguilement: "...she would pour herself a small beaker [of wine] and carry it back to the night table just outside the [english patient's] three-quarter-closed door and sip away further into whatever book she was reading" (7). And another couple pages along, another image: "She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams" (12).

Something is going on here. That something is metafiction, which Chris defined for you as fiction about fiction. Ondaatje is bringing to your attention a surface that we as readers often forget about: the surface of books, the pages of a novel. By foregrounding fiction within this novel, Ondaatje offers some enlightenment to the beguiled reader. Let me give you one more quotation: "This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.... The book lay on her lap. She realized that for more than five minutes she had been looking at the porousness of the paper, the crease at the corner of page 17 which someone had folded over as a mark. She brushed her hand over its skin" (7). This is book as sensual surface

With images like this, Ondaatje subtly forces you to become aware of the process of reading by mirroring it within the text. Another of his metafictional techniques is to give characters names related to novels and novelists. Here, the novel Hana is reading is "Kim" by Rudyard Kipling, the story of a young half-Indian, half-British boy who is raised by both an Eastern holy man and an officer of the British Intelligence Service in India. Kip's name is a complex play on the novel's name and the novelist's. And Kip's character and circumstances are a complex play on the interplay of cultural worlds seen in Kipling's novel. Also, when you read it, watch for several abrupt intrusions by the otherwise absent narrator that jar you out of your beguilement. Ondaatje's references to novels, to story-telling and to historical narratives, to books and fragments of books throughout the novel also remind you as reader what you are doing: reading a fiction.

Metafiction is an interesting kind of enlightenment, because even while it is informing you about the fictiveness of what you're reading, it is also reinforcing that fictional world. That is, even when Ondaatje is almost yelling in your face, "This is all just fiction, don't get sucked in," you are getting sucked in. The world of Hana, Kip and the English Patient stays real for you even when he's telling you it's a fiction: which just shows you how strong the impulse to be beguiled is and how hard we have to work at thinking analytically about fiction.

Another thing the metafiction does is to suggest that there is a way in which we all live inside of fictions. We can see that the characters live inside a fictional world without necessarily losing our sense that their world is real. Through this experience we might recognize that we project meaningful structures onto surfaces all the time: we project "identity" and personality and gender and race onto bodies; we project "nation" and "country" and even "nature" onto the earth; and we project meaning onto novels and histories and other kinds of texts. Art, religion, work, family, pop culture: all of these are in some ways fictions that we live inside, rarely examining their surfaces, rarely thinking about them as fictions.

And that is just as well, since we can't always be thinking about these fictions as fictions. On most levels, most of the time, life just has to carry on. However, sometimes we are jostled out of our comfortable fictions: by illness and death, by love or the end of love, by war or disaster, by a perceived injustice. In the aftershocks of these jolts, after the meaningfulness gets swept away, we have to try to read the surfaces from scratch, to find meaning again, just as Kip, Hana and Caravaggio attempt to make their lives meaningful again after the disorienting experience of war. In such times and in preparation for such times, it helps to have seen characters in a novel process their confusing realities. And it might help when a novel has used metafiction to make us see what we are doing when we process a world's reality.

So: why should you read The English Patient? Why indeed should you read another novel ever? On Monday, both John and Chris challenged you to use fiction to unsettle some of your presuppositions about your culture, about your beliefs. Some of you might have thought, "but why do I want to unsettle what I believe in?" Let me point out that you are allowed to challenge this notion of fiction. Fiction doesn't always have to make you rethink your most basic beliefs. Sometimes all you want and need is a moving experience of another world. So let fiction sweep you away and take every thought out of your head except the feelings that the characters are feeling, and the thoughts they're thinking, and the beauty of the hero or the heroine, and the satisfying climax of the action. Let yourself be beguiled. If fiction doesn't do this, its ideas will never be anything but inert.

But, now that you've taken this course and begun to see what kinds of things can be said about what is happening to you when you're being beguiled, you know how to enrich your enjoyment of fiction and how to engage fully with the claims that a novel is making about your culture and beliefs and world. You can see how the enthralling aspects of fiction are used to communicate ideas. You can see that you need to work your way back through the ambiguous surfaces and landmines of the novel to interact with these ideas. You know how to begin to add enlightenment to the beguilement.

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And a novel like the English Patient offers you layers of enlightenment and beguilement, making it a rich world for this kind of double-edged reading. It draws you into its world; it also forces you to see the surface of its world, to remember that it's all a fiction. But even when it seems to be enlightening you, it's beguiling you yet again at another level and forcing you to stretch your critical faculties to grasp its multiple surfaces and multiple meanings.

So: If you care to be swept away to a thoroughly engaging world beyond your own, you might want to read Ondaatje's English Patient this summer. If you care to be swept away and to let that beguilement inform you about war, about race, about relationships, about pain and death, and about fiction itself, you might want to read the English Patient this summer--twice.

Other Titles by Ondaatje

lecture on The English Patient
English B13, Intro to Fiction
Northwestern University
Spring 1996