Michael Ondaatje's the English patient (1992) and postcolonial impatience

This article approaches Michael Ondaatje's novel. The English Patient [1992](1993b), via its pre‐texts, the autobiographical memoir, Running in theFamily [1982](1993a), and the novel, In the Skin of a Lion [1987](1988). The article first analyses Ondaatje's interpellation as postcolonial subject in Running in the Family and views the generic hybridity of the work in terms of the cultural hybridity of its autobiographical and biographical subjects. The narrative exemplifies the intertextual mode that characterises Ondaatje's writing. In In the Skin of a Lion, through the fragmented and contrapuntal narratives of the marginalised characters, Ondaatje illustrates how inhabiting a dominant discourse through mimicry (Bhabha) is a complex strategy of appropriation and resistance. The ostentatious intertextuality of The English Patient, it is argued, exhibits “postcolonial impatience”: the tension between recognition by postcolonial subjects of the imperialistic narratives by which they are constrained, and their impulse to repossess their own stories, between acknowledgement of inherited cognitive maps and irritation at being blueprinted by these dominant discourses. This postcolonial dynamic of identification and rejection is analysed with reference to the novel's three most important intertexts: Kipling's Kim, Herodotus's Histories, and Caravaggio's painting, “David with the Head of Goliath”

Aesthetics · Appropriation · Art · Hybridity · Intertextuality · Linguistics · Literature · Memoir · Mimicry · Narrative · Sociology · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South African History and Culture · South Asian Studies and Diaspora

• Reflections

  Klaus P Stich•Reflections•1988

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• Discoveries of the Other

  Winfried Siemerling•Discoveries of the Other•1994

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• Culture and Imperialism

  Andrew J Pierre, Edward Said et al.•Foreign Affairs•1993

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