He understood that America completes her West only on the coast of Asia.
—Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael
Tectonic slips and brutal human violence provided random time-capsules of unhistorical lives.
—Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost
Michael Ondaatje’s oeuvre has always borne a fraught relationship to the historical novel, the genre to which his most well-known works lay claim. This is because it owes as much to plunges into the perceptual fields of memory as it does to historiographical grappling with collective narratives of the past. Ondaatje’s early experimental writings—for example, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) and Coming Through Slaughter (1976)—retrace the lives of historical figures (William Bonney and the jazz musician Buddy Bolden), while his most widely read novels—The English Patient (1992) and Anil’s Ghost (2000)—unfold amid the conflicts of World War II and the Sri Lankan civil war. Beyond their subject matter, Ondaatje’s works reflect upon history as a mode of writing and a pattern of assembly. The books’ trademark style depends on the aesthetics of the fragment, which eschews representations of history as either an impersonal social force or a recoverable totality. Perhaps the most concentrated symbol of Ondaatje’s unorthodox historical vision comes from The English Patient: a copy of Herodotus’s The Histories, which the protagonist, Almásy, transforms into a personal archive by superimposing passages from other works, ephemera, and handwritten notes of his own desert adventures over parts of Herodotus’s text. Ondaatje uses the conceit of The Histories-turned-scrapbook to reverse the conventional order of archive and history, a maneuver that transforms a closed book into an open one.
The most influential theorists of the archive in the past fifty years have been Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, both of whom have described it as an architecture of control. Foucault’s seminal definition established the archive as “first the law of what can be said…. [It] defines at the outset the system of [a statement’s] enunciability” (emphasis in original).1 Such singular enunciations are always to be disrupted in Derrida’s philosophy, but he too begins his theoretical foray into the archive with an emphasis on authority. Embedded into archive’s etymology is the root arkhe, which denotes both commencement and commandment.2 Indebted as we are to the work of Foucault and Derrida, we have grown accustomed to defining the archive as preceding and determining any possible claim to history—indeed, as conferring authority upon history. Whether in print, oral, or digital mediums, and despite any actual archive being the product of collection, organization, and transmission, the idea of the archive is synonymous with beginnings.3 Ondaatje’s novels affirm this connotative truth, but they also show us something else, which subjects it to pressure: historical narratives can generate new archives.
Almásy’s individualized copy of The Histories encapsulates what is both exciting and distressing about Ondaatje’s literary treatment of history. In transforming The Histories from a finished narrative into an expanding archive, Ondaatje suggests that history, like modernity, is an unfinishable project and, more importantly, an unstable genre—one that will bear the imprint of personal experience, desire, and apocrypha. When Almásy turns The Histories into a personal archive of his desert explorations, he reveals self-indulgence, not expertise—an indulgence that some critics have argued afflicts Ondaatje as well. A recurring charge against Ondaatje is that he takes on historical topics without a historicist’s eye, expressing nostalgia for the past without adequate sensitivity to the dynamics of causality and continuity that link the past to the present.4 Indeed, with his affection for depicting fleeting impressions and aestheticized respites in the midst of violent conflicts, Ondaatje would seem to revive those elements of modernist temperament that are most associated with an evasion of political conflict through escape into the private realm of consciousness.
I agree that Ondaatje walks a fine line between romanticizing and realistically portraying the past. However, I also propose that his work occasionally overindulges speculative, phenomenological, and aesthetic engagements with the past in order to activate nostalgia’s ambiguously critical potential. Recalling the etymological roots of nostalgia in pain and homesickness, Ranjana Khanna emphasizes its connotation of wounding over its connotation of sentimentality, and suggests the former carries an “encrypted critical relation” to its object.5 Interlacing pain and sweetness, nostalgia does not necessarily simplify the past, nor does it guarantee that its alteration in the mind’s eye will act as a refuge from rather than a response to the demands of the present. Ondaatje’s novels cultivate the symbolism of symbolic landscapes—like Almásy’s “half-invented” desert, but also the American West of Billy the Kid and the sacred sites turned killing fields of Sri Lanka—as a way of exploring the interface between myth and history.6 These discourses, which typically help to define the nation by creating a shared sense of the past, perform the opposite function in Ondaatje’s work: they take sharing beyond the comfortable sentimental space of bounded tradition into the wider and more diffuse networks of global collectivity.
The transnationally shared pasts that Ondaatje’s novels explore are made possible by what I call his archival method. Ondaatje develops an aesthetics and philosophy of the archive that magnify the instabilities of history, myth, and memory that Almásy’s scrapbooking connotes at a metaphoric level. Where Almásy turns a historical text into an archival book, Ondaatje’s archival novels also display strategies that give them an open-ended, unsynthesized, and shape-shifting quality. They use the archive as structure and style not so much to demystify the ideological structures of the nation or its icons but to immerse them in a proliferation of new materials, contexts, and technologies of meaning-making that break down the very boundaries that nationalist myths shore up.
In this sense, Ondaatje’s novels certainly deviate from the realist function of the historical novel that Georg Lukács called “the awakening of national sensibility”; but perhaps more surprisingly, they also exceed the label of historiographic metafiction that has long been their designation.7 Though this generic category of postmodernism has been crucial to explaining the self-consciousness of Ondaatje’s novels about the narrative dimensions of history, it does not comparably address their aesthetic investment in the proliferation or materiality of artifacts. Nor does it speak to their interest in those not-always-textual traces of memory that remain invisible within the discourses of history and thus stand as chimeras because of their oblique relation to the real. In this respect, Ondaatje’s novels present a version of the archive that is not entirely wedded to the historical and that can be affectively confounding—a version reminiscent of Foucault’s reencounter with the archive in his late work “The Lives of Infamous Men.”
If the Foucault of The Archaeology of Knowledge gives us a theory of the archive as a system that determines all forms of enunciation, the Foucault of “The Lives of Infamous Men” describes an actual archive whose materials evade enunciation. In the essay, Foucault recalls a set of prison records in the Bibliothèque Nationale that contains snatches of obscure lives whose only recognition came from their encounters with power. Foucault refers to these records as “strange poems,” the intensity of which derives precisely from their brevity and archival contextualization as records to be saved.8 Foucault aestheticizes the lives of his subjects not to deny or sanitize their historical existence but to capture their contact with the present. The essay becomes a meditation on how to represent obscure lives in a way that preserves the emotional force their meagerness has upon him and that remains true to the objective meagerness of available information. He arrives at the genre of the legend.
According to Foucault, legends (like chimeras) are defined by “a certain equivocation of the fictitious and the real.” Though a legend often emerges from a surplus of stories that raise a historically real person to the level of myth, it may also derive from the opposite situation, in which the absence of information about a life effectively derealizes it, relegating it (as opposed to elevating it) to the status of myth. The archive thus becomes a space from which legends might emerge alongside histories, and it is in this respect that Ondaatje’s archival method differentiates his work from the historical novel in its realist and metafictional modes. It is precisely because Ondaatje is as interested in mythography as he is in historiography that his works are able to dissect the stories that nations tell to define themselves not just as communities evolving over time but as communities that derive character, shape, and purpose from a particular understanding and performance of their origins. His archival method vivifies the reductions and remainders, which accompany the transformation of stored artifacts and fragments into stories with semantic power.9
In contending with the necessity for and limits of synthesis in the making of collective narratives, whether national or international, Ondaatje’s archival method revives the epistemological quandaries that I have associated with Tagore’s modernist methods of compilation and translation. Both writers see their work as intervening in the construction (and reconstruction) not just of national origin stories but also of stories of international relation and perception. By emphasizing the relationship between the transmission of content (across languages, media, and discursive register) and its solidification into meaningful and usable knowledge forms, Ondaatje shows that an archival sensibility that embraces rather than rejects chimeras is essential to engaging debates about national renovation and international justice.
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Anil’s Ghost serve to exemplify Ondaatje’s archival method as it develops around two very different kinds of chimeric national legends: the historical figure William Bonney who became the mythical antihero Billy the Kid, and the skeleton Sailor—an unidentified victim of state terror who comes to represent the “unhistorical lives” lost during Sri Lanka’s civil war.10 These legends—Billy the Kid in the conventional sense of an embellished identity, Sailor in the obscure sense of Foucault’s infamous men—become flashpoints of collective definition in the novels as they reinscribe American and Sri Lankan national pasts within networks of transnational memory.
In Collected Works, Ondaatje transforms Billy from a national icon to a global one, working against the imperialist strains of frontier mythology and contemporary nativist strains of cultural property to present a mythology of the Wild West that arises from beyond an American discourse of national character. In turn, in Anil’s Ghost, “Sailor,” the skeletal remains of an unidentified victim, becomes the center of debates about how to read and rectify human rights abuses by the Sri Lankan state during the nation’s civil war—whether by seeking justice in the legal-historical realm or by pursuing national reconstruction through the renovation of communal myths. The novel balances the struggles of the former path with the limitations of the latter, contextualizing the search for Sailor’s identity within a larger meditation on the discourses of history, myth, and artistry that the novel’s characters use to name him and to imagine national reconstruction in the wake of the war.
Taking both novels together, we observe Ondaatje elaborating collective pasts that move outward across multiple traditions rather than moving backwards within a single national tradition. At a formal level, his archival legends thus disturb the sense of national cohesion that realist versions of the historical novel helped to foster. At a historical and an ethical level, such disturbances pivotally adapt the genre to the contemporary cosmopolitical challenge of reframing national pasts—and by extension futures—through a wider matrix of cultural pathways and collective categories (for example, the ethnic, the religious, the transnational, or the abstract “human” of human rights).
ARCHIVING FRONTIERS: THE COLLECTED WORKS OF BILLY THE KID
Ondaatje’s rendition of the outlaw Bonney, aka Billy the Kid, tests national mythologies by taking the defining symbol of American (that is to say, U.S.) self-identity—the frontier—and subjecting it to transnational reinvention and critique. Ann Mandel described the Canadian reception of Collected Works as “praised by critics and readers and roundly condemned—to [Ondaatje’s] delight—by federal MPs [members of parliament] for dealing with an American hero and outlaw” (her emphasis).11 Ondaatje’s afterword to the 2008 edition of Collected Works echoes Mandel’s earlier assessment, but with respect to his reception in the United States: “I couldn’t afford to go south [to the United States to write, in the 1960s] so it was an eventual delight when a review of the book [Collected Works] in a Texas newspaper a few years later complained that a Canadian had been allowed to edit the journals of Billy the Kid.”12 Ondaatje’s pleasure is twofold: he appreciates that his work has been mistaken for Bonney’s actual journals, blurring the line between primary source and secondary fiction; yet he seems even more satisfied with the way his work’s archival mode, in suggesting editorship over authorship, defies notions of national propriety and thematic appropriateness on both sides of the Canada–United States border.13
In fact, the “Canadian” Ondaatje, who was born in Sri Lanka and moved to England at age nine, and then to Canada at nineteen (eight years before Collected Works was first published), uses the very American iconicity of Billy the Kid to counter nativism of the sort that permeated some of his book’s reviews and, more significantly, to rewrite the frontier mythology that has become so crucial to narratives about American character. Character here is not just cultural but also a form of political unconscious that generates strong emotion around the delineating, claiming, and sharing of a tradition. As Ernest Gellner has argued, and the reactions of the members of Canadian parliament show, the strength and exploitation of those sentiments can turn desirable forms of national cohesion into dangerous and, in this case, petty nativism.14
The legend of Billy the Kid, of course, is inseparable from the cultural reproduction and political use of the American West as a symbolic landscape for the coalescence of national character. The frontier had begun to take on mythic status as early as 1893, with Frederick Jackson Turner’s address “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” The frontier thesis, as is well known, shifted the foundation of U.S. identity away from the Atlantic world and toward the “Great West,” where the conjuncture of “savagery and civilization” gave rise to peculiarly American qualities of individuality, ingenuity, and ruggedness.15 Turner’s thesis devalued European influence in favor of frontier transactions just as the actual frontier was closing down, making an imagined frontier central to his narrative of American history and laying the foundation for historical and popular perceptions of American identity as self-contained and exceptional.16
In Collected Works, Ondaatje reimagines frontier mythology not by debunking it, as many twentieth-century historians and novelists have done, but by using it to counter notions of American isolationism and exceptionalism that could be said to begin with the frontier thesis. He does this by mixing archival materials that have helped produce Billy the Kid as an American icon with Ondaatje’s own poetry, prose, and photographs, which disperses construction of the “Wild West” beyond the United States. The form of Collected Works is thus remarkably resistant to classification as it weaves together elements of narrative, lyric, and scrapbook. It is told from both an omniscient perspective and Billy’s own, taking us through the last year of Billy’s life, from his initial skirmishes with the sheriff Pat Garrett to his arrest, escape, and eventual death at Garrett’s hands. It also incorporates newspaper articles, interviews, excerpts from pulp novels, and popular historical accounts of Bonney’s exploits, which remind us that “Billy” is a discursive creation. Ondaatje’s assembly of these documentary and entertainment artifacts allows him to defamiliarize Billy’s legend by experimenting with the very genres that have made him familiar to a global audience. As Lee Spinks has noted, “We think we know the story before we read the story,” and I agree with Spinks that Ondaatje is referencing “our…imaginative investment in Billy’s historical drama” when he creates an archive of Billy narratives.17 In addition, however, Collected Works reflects upon the question of who that “our” is, particularly when it dissociates Billy from the distinctive Americanness that his legacy helped to produce.
Ondaatje uses several primary source texts in Collected Works, but the plot leading from Billy’s first shoot-out with Garrett to his assassination is largely drawn from Walter Noble Burns’s The Saga of Billy the Kid (1926). Burns’s account is widely regarded as an embellished history that synthesized documentary materials with creative interpretations, including imaginatively staged conversations (or reenactments) among characters. As the generic label of “saga” promises, Burns’s book is more accurately described as an exercise in mythography. The book was wildly successful, has never gone out of print since its publication, and is the guiding influence over popular impressions of the outlaw today.18
Ondaatje’s choice of this best seller, more romance than history, as a primary source reinforces his investment in the West as a mythic space and perceptual category. His passages from Billy’s point of view re-create the atmospheric conventions of the Western through a mix of exalted and graphic language. Billy’s first words are “These are the killed,” which becomes a dramatic refrain threading through his recitation of those he killed and those who were killed by his enemies, including Garrett. Billy’s closing line in this lyric passage (“Blood a necklace on me all my life”) establishes the mythology of the West, translating its violence into coarse beauty and the litany of the killed into a reflection of Billy’s own metaphysical turmoil as he foresees his death (“and Pat Garrett/sliced off my head”).19 The conflicting tones of pathos and gore capture the West as it has been dramatized by writers like Burns, who transformed the skirmishes between outlaws and authorities in New Mexico and Texas into a potent cultural fantasy of antihero heroism.
Ondaatje’s portrayal of Billy the Kid emphasizes Billy’s awareness of his legacy within that national origin story, an awareness that oscillates between self-aggrandizement and self-dissection. By allowing Billy to reflect proleptically upon his future inscriptions within the numerous genres that fill Collected Works, Ondaatje disrupts the narrative’s temporal unities precisely at moments in which his protagonist opens the spatial coordinates of American mythology beyond the United States. This formal strategy, which interrupts what Benedict Anderson so famously called the “meanwhile” of the realist novel’s imagined community,20 becomes a mechanism for reimagining frontier mythology as transnational movement:
Not a story about me through their eyes then. Find the beginning, the slight silver key to unlock it, to dig it out. Here then is a maze to begin, be in.
Two years ago Charlie Bowdre and I criss-crossed the Canadian border. Ten miles north of it ten miles south. Our horses stepped from country to country, across low rivers, through different colours of tree green. The two of us, our criss-cross like a whip in slow motion, the ridge of action rising and falling, getting narrower in radius till it ended and we drifted down to Mexico and old heat. That there is nothing of depth, of significant accuracy, of wealth in the image, I know. It is there for a beginning.
(Collected Works, 17)
In this passage we witness Billy’s refusal to abide by his placement within the American mythos by seemingly “whipping” over the United States in his oppositional search for self-definition. His particular evocation of “the beginning” is unusual for many reasons, not the least of which is that it is studded by pairs. These pairs eschew the certainty of a single point of origin, instead building a “maze” of visual and sonic echoes (“begin, be in”; “two years ago”; “two of us”; “ten miles north…ten miles south”; “criss-cross”; “rising and falling”). Ondaatje’s insistent doubling, the symmetry of these phrases, generates a rare equanimity in Billy’s voice as it refracts national unities of time and space through a continental criss-cross in which Canada and Mexico become explicit sites of “beginning” as well.
Ondaatje’s deviation into an almost pastoral mode accompanies the expansion of American terrain from the national to the continental scale. In acknowledging this wider geography beneath the moniker “American,” the passage dissociates Billy’s self-consciousness from the history of consciousness that underlay frontier mythology’s imperial forms. Instead, the vectored motion of westward expansion becomes more undulating beneath Billy and Charlie’s meandering. Their criss-cross, their symmetry, and finally their narrowing radius bring together Canada and Mexico in a pattern of movement that seems to erase the distinctiveness of the United States altogether.
It is important that Billy betrays a certain lack of faith in his recollection (“That there is nothing of depth, of significant accuracy, of wealth in the image, I know”). This skepticism is part of how Ondaatje’s transnational American scene changes the performance of beginnings. Neither Billy nor Ondaatje aims to replace a national origin myth with a continental one as an absolute good; instead, the passage casts about for ways of remembering that disregard the impulse to singular belonging in the writing of both individual and collective selves. Although the character of Billy begins by disavowing the legend of Billy the Kid, Collected Works clearly manages to pluralize his origins through Billy’s ever-growing archival afterlife—an afterlife that swerves beyond the expected sites and sources.
The text’s opening page flaunts this point by introducing readers to a photographic outline with no picture within, followed by a passage excerpted from Huffman, Frontier Photographer, stating, “I send you a picture of Billy made from a Perry shutter as quick as it can be worked—Pyro and soda developer” (Collected Works, 1). Ondaatje plays here with mimetic representation, progressive temporality, and structures of address, denying us an image of Billy taken by his contemporary, L. A. Huffman (although other Huffman photographs are allowed to populate the book), suggesting that it is the partial blankness of the past that provides the occasion and the opportunity of the present to bring it to life. The empty photographic frame visually conveys a withholding of information that is also a statement about representation. The reality of Billy’s existence as an icon is irreducible to a photographic portrait with its patina of the real, compression of historical distance, and illusions of rational-critical selfhood. Ondaatje uses its erasure to mediate between the highly localized Huffman gloss and the globalized future that the Collected Works will open through less direct and more diverse forms of mimesis.
As Collected Works proceeds, its amassed artifacts absorb Billy’s character into the mythologies of the frontier. Interspersed interviews with Sally Chisum (daughter of John Chisum, a cattle baron and Billy’s foe) and Billy’s lover, Paulita Maxwell, depict him as a gentleman, always meticulously attired (“As far as dress was concerned/he always looked as if/he had just stepped out of a bandbox” [91]), while Billy’s first-person passages capture the horrific violence he witnessed (“Jesus I never knew that did you/the nerves shot out/the liver running around there” [8]). The colloquy of these voices captures the classic antinomies of the frontier—the encounter between savagery and civility, to recall Turner’s phrase—in the emergence of Billy as the archetypal outlaw. An excerpt from an actual pulp novel entitled Billy the Kid and the Princess and a fabricated interview with Billy in the Texas Star further bridge the production of his image to the modern-day culture industry, particularly when Billy anachronistically mentions a “Mr. Cassavetes” upon being asked how he will be remembered.21
The range of artifactual and invented excerpts that couple fairy tales with westerns captures the comic contradictions in Billy’s legacy and culminates in a final photograph of Ondaatje himself as a young boy, in a garish cowboy costume (figure 4.1). The author’s photo wryly recalls the empty photographic frame of the first page. Comparing these images suggests the extent to which Billy’s legend has grown through the reproduction of his tale in the circulation of mass culture, but it also more immediately blurs the line between reception and production as the author, via a childhood photograph, takes his place within the narrative he has crafted.
By including a picture of himself within Collected Works, Ondaatje could be read as making a classically postmodern gesture of self-reference. If this is the case, then the nostalgic mood and grainy quality of the image remind us that postmodernism and modernism are never as distinct as stagist narratives of literary history imply. As a token of personal memory and self-implication in the fantasies of Collected Works, the author’s photo is decidedly innocent. It is precisely this politically unfashionable longing that invites metafictional disruption back into a more concrete worldliness. In his afterword to the 2008 edition of Collected Works, Ondaatje reveals the location of the photograph as Sri Lanka, in the course of detailing his childhood love of westerns:
I’d had an obsession with westerns since I was eight or nine—for even in Sri Lanka the myth of the American West had filtered down furtively among children in Colombo. I had a cowboy suit, with blatantly cheap-looking glass “jewels” on my cowboy belt as well as little leather holders for one’s bullets, which always seemed to me to be a fey and fussy method of transporting bullets that would later be used to kill a mule or a woman or a sheriff. So, when our house in Boralesgamuwa was robbed, I was glad to see that the jewelled cowboy belt was also stolen, only to be returned by the police several months later.
(113)
By remembering his past, Ondaatje’s afterword ends up indirectly describing the picture in the main text, explicitly introducing a transnational context for frontier mythology in his recollections of the cowboy suit. Such a context could only be guessed at in previous editions. Add this to the Canadian context of production that Ondaatje invokes later in the afterword, and we see that the 2008 edition of Collected Works solicits interpretations more attuned to medium specificity and circulation than the 1970 edition.
FIGURE 4.1 Michael Ondaatje as a child. Copyright © 1970 Michael Ondaatje. Reprinted by permission of Michael Ondaatje.
Arjun Appadurai has suggested that theorizing globalization provokes a renewed engagement with the idea of contextualization, defined not just as a practice of explanatory grounding but also as a generator of new kinds of production.22 Appadurai considers context to be dynamic, whether an object is being assimilated or defamiliarized, particularly when supposedly distant or deterritorialized contexts (such as Sri Lanka as a site for cowboy culture) exert pressure on an object’s definition. Although he is speaking of context from within the discipline of anthropology, Appadurai’s insights are relevant to literary study and are conversant with methodologies in editorial theory and world literature that take variations of a text to be a valuable record of the work’s interaction with the societies through which it has traveled. By refusing to draw sharp distinctions between text and paratext, figure and ground in Collected Works, we better understand the phenomenon of proliferation that is so central to the endurance of myth.
To be sure, Ondaatje’s 2008 afterword contextualizes his work in explanatory ways that add to our background knowledge of Collected Works, but his archival method also allows for the afterword to be part of the work—to be read as another artifact in the collection, whose legend of Billy the Kid expands and alters to take on different implications in the latest edition. To read the afterword as blurring the line between context and artifact is, to borrow a phrase from Ann Laura Stoler, to read along the archival grain.23 Such a reading traces the active process by which categories and facts change, and it shows that the contingency of epistemological apparatuses render Billy an always partially known, unfinished figure. The practices that bring him to light create both the glow and the haze surrounding him, intensifying his legend by heightening his inscrutability as more documents emerge.
The cover of the 2008 edition of Collected Works illustrates my claims by bringing new artifacts of Bonney’s afterlife into the structure of his literary representation (see figure 4.2). In contrast to previous editions, which featured portraits of Billy on their covers (a choice that reduced the power of the blank photograph in the main text), the 2008 edition features a photograph of two Mexican actors portraying Billy the Kid and Garrett.24 This extra layer of mediation (a photograph of a cross-racial performance) beautifully encapsulates the relationship between artifice and artifact established throughout the rest of the work. In doing so, the cover also pulls from the archive another context (or “maze,” to recall Ondaatje’s image) from which Billy can “begin, be in.” The form of Collected Works is accordingly kept open, leaving room for the possibility that more artifacts, more genres, and (with them) more contexts will and should be added to the legend of Billy.
FIGURE 4.2 Front cover of Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 2008 edition. Used by permission of Vintage Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.
Notably, Ondaatje’s choices of proliferation—the Sri Lanka anecdote and the photograph of Mexican performers—vivifies a method that does not just dig deeper but also moves outward in an unlikely adaptation of the expansionist credo embedded within frontier mythology. What makes the 2008 Collected Works so interesting is the way in which its archival accumulations tie into a transnational theory of reception and production, multiplying the contexts of Billy’s emergence in order to multiply the collectivities that frontier mythology serves. It follows that this edition of Collected Works offers something stronger than the claim that the American West “filtered down” into Colombo or, for that matter, across to Mexico, something contradictory to the imperial agency concentrated in Charles Olson’s assertion that “America completes her West only on the coast of Asia.”25 Sri Lanka and Mexico range through the American West in the revised Collected Works, deranging Olson’s frontier dream of completion and rearranging it as an open set to be occupied and extended by foreign nationals with their own ends. Collected Works thus counters notions of cultural property and propriety not by demystifying the frontier as a symbol of American identity and mythology but by redistributing it among agents of myth and memory beyond the United States.
UNHISTORICAL LIVES / MYTHISTORICAL REMAINS
If the archival form of Collected Works widens the geography of familiar, even iconic stories, changing them in the process, Anil’s Ghost reanimates that form to tell stories of the “disappeared”—or, more precisely, to tell stories that capture the complexities of representing the disappeared when the written archive is painfully thin. The novel unfolds in Sri Lanka during the 1980s and 1990s, when the nation was riven by a Sinhalese majority government and a Tamil insurgency that was itself split between separatists fighting for a Tamil state and those fighting for better representation within the Sri Lankan state.26
The plot revolves around Anil Tissera, a Sri Lankan expatriate and forensic anthropologist working for an international human rights organization, likely affiliated with the United Nations. Her mission to investigate human rights abuses takes shape through her discovery of the skeleton she names Sailor. Anil finds Sailor in the “sacred historical site” of Bandarawela, a government-restricted zone, which leads her to conclude that the state has been using centuries-old ruins to camouflage its modern-day killings (Anil’s Ghost, 52). With the help of partners on the ground—an archaeologist named Sarath Diyasena and a local artist by the name of Ananda—Anil sets out to identify Sailor as the victim of state-sponsored terror under the somewhat naive conviction that her findings will compel state accountability and ultimately secure justice for its victims. The novel’s politics, however, quickly veer away from the global law-and-order scenario of Anil’s imagination. Instead, Anil’s Ghost develops into a narrative that questions the efficacy of its protagonist’s ideals by diverting the main plot of historical recovery and justice-seeking through subplots that frame the contemporary Sri Lankan conflict within the distant pasts of Buddhist, Chinese, and other civilizations.
To summarize Anil’s Ghost is to evoke a novel that could not seem more different from Collected Works in theme and setting. Where Collected Works reflects upon the legends that arise from a surplus of information and in the name of a powerful nation, Anil’s Ghost concentrates on the crucial absence of information, on lives like Sailor’s that were “disappeared” by the state and that come to represent national disintegration as opposed to national wholeness. Whereas Ondaatje distributes Billy across several transnational geographies to contest the time/space unities of Americanness, he uses Sailor to evaluate both globalist and localist responses to national fracture. The globalist sutures collective memory to the universal category of the human; the localist brings it back into an enclosed narrative of the nation. Neither response constitutes an adequate solution, leading the novel into a meditation on the work that memory does and the criteria of relevance that separate myth from history, and one group from another. These questions require Ondaatje to thematize the archival as well as to stylize it: the novel productively extends the definition of archive to include archaeological sites, Sailor’s bones, and Buddhist statues—each of which contextualizes the here and now of the civil war within several other histories and geographies of destructive memory loss.
Ondaatje’s compilation of these disparate pasts and his paratactic way of arranging them became especially controversial with the release of this novel, as some critics claimed he took too much aesthetic license with the real lives lost during the turmoil. Tom LeClair wrote, “Ondaatje should distrust himself. Now I don’t trust his collage method. It’s a way to avoid banal ‘old coin’ cause and effect, the logic by which human rights are denied or defended.”27 LeClair’s attribution of obfuscation to collage recalls the argument that Lukács made against modernist montage in 1938, when he argued that that the technique juxtaposed “heterogeneous, unrelated pieces of reality torn from their context.”28 What made montage (and modernism) so dangerous for Lukács was that, in claiming to represent the “chaos” of reality, it shrouded the relationship between the individual’s experience of disintegration and the progressive integration of capitalism worldwide. Modernism’s subjectivity obscured structural conditions and consequently perpetuated false consciousness by divorcing the experience of chaos from an analysis of the economic order.
Lukács’s argument is obviously more generalizing than LeClair’s, which addresses a particular historical conflict rather than the nature of “reality” as such. Still, the principle is the same. LeClair, too, believes that formal disjunction—for example, the dissolution of Ondaatje’s “detective plot” into “rapid switching among characters, times, locales”—inhibits understanding of the conflict it portrays by substituting the experiences of some individuals for the root causes of the civil war. Collage’s negative epistemological effects breed ethical violations for LeClair, who sees Ondaatje’s mystifications as inadvertently exploiting the Sri Lankan dead rather than elegizing, honoring, or, most importantly, doing them justice.
LeClair’s desire for a plot that solves rather than dissolves is warranted, but it misses the reality that Ondaatje is portraying and the historicist style of explanation that he is questioning. Ondaatje’s archival method, of which collage is part but not all, expresses the conditions of incompleteness and unknowing that the war induced. In doing so, it uses Sailor as a Foucauldian “legend” to open up larger philosophical questions about the limits of historicism as responsible representation, particularly when conducted in the name of a human rights investigation that has no influence on national reconstruction. Like Collected Works, Anil’s Ghost does not develop an archive that will set the historical record straight by supplying the “right” information; rather, it uses a variety of traces, documents, and artifacts to wed collective memory to a critical examination of Enlightenment rationalism’s limits. Even if readers concede that cause-and-effect narratives are essential to assigning responsibility in historical conflicts, such narratives simplify the milieu that they describe and thus diminish responses that do not take the shape of a verdict.
The most powerful meditations on historicist logic and its rules of relevance come in the company of Sailor, as Ondaatje situates Anil’s rigorously empirical task of forensic identification within a narrative of her more “tender” discoveries, which merit quoting at length:
She loosened the swaddling plastic that covered Sailor. In her work Anil turned bodies into representatives of race and age and place, though for her the tenderest of all discoveries was the finding, some years earlier, of the tracks at Laetoli—almost-four-million-year-old footsteps of a pig, a hyena, a rhinoceros and a bird, this strange ensemble identified by a twentieth-century tracker. Four unrelated creatures that had walked hurriedly over a wet layer of volcanic ash. To get away from what? Historically more significant were other tracks in the vicinity, of a hominid assumed to be approximately five feet tall (one could tell by the pivoting heel impressions). But it was that quartet of animals walking from Laetoli four million years ago that she liked to think about.
The most precisely recorded moments of history lay adjacent to the extreme actions of nature or civilization. She knew that. Pompeii. Laetoli. Hiroshima. Vesuvius (whose fumes had asphyxiated poor Pliny while he recorded its “tumultuous behaviour”). Tectonic slips and brutal human violence provided random time-capsules of unhistorical lives.
(Anil’s Ghost, 55)
There is a tendency in the critical literature on Anil’s Ghost to define Anil as limited by her unflaggingly forensic gaze. Yet this rarely discussed passage illustrates a character that is not entirely in thrall to the norms of historical or scientific positivism. Anil is sentimentally attuned to what historical standards of significance leave out and to what they cannot answer—namely, how irregular collectives form in the midst of crisis and how the motivating circumstances of such relations (“To get away from what?”) place the blind spots of forensic deduction into relief.
It is no mistake that animal prints fall outside the scope of historical significance. Their superfluity confirms the division of human and natural history, tacitly informing epistemic value, and thus lends insight into the development of the human as a category closed off from the animal.29 It is the singular hominid, not the menagerie, that is supposed to matter to Anil, and yet, by pausing over the trivial “quartet of animals,” she glimpses the dialectical emergence of the universal “human” in human rights. As Jacques Derrida has argued, the concept of “the animal” in philosophical discourse has enabled the concept of “the human” to emerge as a transcendent category precisely because it engenders a forgetting of actual animals. The plural animals, in Derrida’s words, designate “all the livings things that man does not recognize as his fellows.”30
The remains of a quartet of animals draw Anil away from her duties and into fellowship with the motley outside of “human being” as concept. Such remains also betoken Ondaatje’s suspicion of the “human” as an abstract legal category, the neatness of which obscures the reality of individual lives as a condition of protecting them. Anil’s fleeting recollection of the animals’ prints conjures effects that are powerful for their brevity and inarticulateness—a set of fossil records that, like Foucault’s strange poems of infamous men, bear silent witness to their own forgetting. Such witness would not be possible without Ondaatje’s willingness to evoke the distracted and associative nature of Anil’s thought. By indulging what Anil “liked to think about,” as opposed to what she should think about, Ondaatje allows the personal memories of a wandering consciousness to mingle with scientific investigation and reorder the value of its findings.
Anil’s affective response to ancient remains effectively casts doubt on her initial goal of removing Sailor from his swaddling plastic and placing him in a narrative as an identified figure. Anil’s job demands that she turn “bodies into representatives of race and age and place,” creating the legible evidence that public justice demands. Yet the movement of this passage sets the pursuit of such legibility next to a catalog of disasters that, in generating so much empirical detail, seem only to retreat from historical comprehension. The fieldwork and lab work of archaeology and forensics certainly function for Ondaatje as empirical sciences, but also, when allowed room, as interpretive arts that provide windows into phenomenological experience. Disciplines that treat the earth and bodies as archives, they preserve Anil’s encounter with remains before rationalizing those remains into demographic data. Such preservation of experience gestures toward the contingency of historical knowledge and allows Ondaatje to insert hermeneutic reflection into his protagonist’s positivist framework. Pompeii, Hiroshima, Vesuvius, and, specifically, Laetoli in Tanzania become nodes of a global disaster circuit that explains the conditions that produce the “most precisely recorded moments of history.” If contextualizing Sailor within the landscape of transnational memory minimizes the here and now of his murder in Sri Lanka, it does so in an attempt to elucidate a larger range of possibility for deciphering the significance of “unhistorical lives” to national culture and international law. Bringing Sailor to demographic light, Ondaatje suggests, is insufficient for understanding how the zone of the unhistorical is delimited within those precisely recorded moments of “brutal human violence” and how it is sustained when human rights norms monopolize definitions of justice and remembrance.
Although Anil’s memory of fieldwork makes it possible to enlarge and diversify the scales at which she (and we) might conceive a significant memory, her professional commitments to the human rights commission do not allow her to reevaluate the way official history is told:
She remembered Clyde Snow, her teacher in Oklahoma, speaking about human rights work in Kurdistan: One village can speak for many villages. One victim can speak for many victims. She and Sarath both knew that in all the turbulent history of the island’s recent civil wars, in all the token police investigations, not one murder charge had been made during the troubles. But this could be a clear case against the government.
(Anil’s Ghost, 178)
Anil cleaves closely to human rights principles, as articulated by Snow, when she claims that identifying Sailor not only will retrieve him from the “unhistorical dead” (note the revision in Anil’s mind of “unhistorical lives”) but also will perform an act of collective reclamation: “This representative of all those lost voices. To give him a name would name the rest” (56). Anil’s Ghost, however, invites deep criticism of this metonymic ethos, questioning its real-world efficacy and the adequacy of restitution that it implies. The novel unravels Anil’s mission by allowing it to succeed in its immediate ends—Anil does indeed identify Sailor’s bones as the body of a “real” person, Ruwan Kumara—but then denies the identification any positive force when Anil meets a panel of Sri Lankan officials who refuse to ratify her findings.
Sailor’s continued illegibility, even after Anil restores him to history as Kumara, illustrates what the novel calls, via Sarath, “the archaeological surround of a fact” (44). For Sarath, this surround refers immediately to the political climate of Sri Lanka, in which Anil’s attempts to speak truth to power are not so much brave as futile, for the state will not recognize or act upon her findings in any way. As the source of such pragmatic reminders about the limits of truth in an authoritarian regime, Sarath often seems like the realist foil to Anil’s misguided idealism. But the friction between them does not always leave Anil the loser. Rather, it prompts unpredictable position-taking around the function of time in the international politics of intervention.
We see the problem of temporality most vividly in Sarath’s debates with Anil, when he describes excavating remnants from a fifth-century B.C. Chinese civilization and finding twenty female musicians killed in a ritual ceremony with their instruments (mainly bells) alongside them. These musicians were servants of an “ancient ruler” who, upon his death, wanted the women to accompany him into the next world (260). While Sarath recalls the beauty of those bells in the mythic language of ancientness, Anil sees another site of violence, and their conflictual interpretations lend insight into their respective senses of vocation:
“Possibly it was those bells that made me an archaeologist.”
“Twenty murdered women.”
“It was another world with its own value system that came to the surface.”
“Love me, love my orchestra. You can take it with you! That kind of madness lies within the structure of all civilizations, not just in distant cultures.”
(261)
Sarath, a responsible historicist, can only see the deep past in terms of its externality to history and therefore uses myth to collapse cultural relativism with ethical relativism. He refuses to impose his norms on the past and consequently forgoes any kind of judgment beyond the aesthetic. Anil does not refuse ethical judgment, and she insinuates that Sarath’s appreciation of the artifacts overlooks the patriarchy that made their presence possible. His attitude to the past facilitates certain occlusions in the present—for example, the failure to see how the power structures of an ancient civilization might be not only comparable to modern societies but indeed still operative within them.
Sarath’s decision to separate his archaeological excavations and aesthetic judgments from his ethical and political judgment prevents him from seeing proximities between the temporally “distant cultures” that he idealizes and those contemporary forms of nation-state sovereignty that also perpetrate violence against their citizens. Where Sarath sees in ancient China a world separated by time’s passage, Anil sees the bells in the vein of Benjamin’s historical materialism: as relics of a civilization that are also signs of its barbarism. Ironically, the advocate of Eurocentric norms also imparts the postcolonial lesson. The question is whether she uses Sarath’s memory of the dig to equate anachronistically the past with the present or uses it as a legitimation myth for human rights activities in general. If all societies carry the potential for violence against their members, then international organizations theoretically have a role to play in protecting the vulnerable.
That Anil and Sarath’s debate turns on the fate of women may seem to have echoes of an imperial civilizing mission, but the fact that it is Anil, a former Sri Lankan citizen, making these claims suggests more than opportunism. There is no good position in the Sri Lankan conflict, and the story of the burial site highlights the problem of remembrance in the face of present concerns. Women or bells? Ondaatje gives us both, because gender violence, which remains at the center of human rights discourse in the present, cannot be relegated to the dustbin of history, even if 500 B.C. can.
Anil and Sarath’s interpretive impasse broaches some of the most interesting conversations happening in world literature and postcolonial studies right now, particularly with regard to time scales that reactivate the distant past as part of a political present. Wai Chee Dimock, with her captivating Through Other Continents and its formulation of “deep time” for literary history, represents one powerful advocate for an enlarged scale of literary study, and the book has become a locus of debates around the uses, abuses, and conceptual challenges of doing literary history at a world scale. Dimock’s concept of “deep time” does away with the calendar dates of American national history (e.g., 1776) and colonial history (e.g., 1620) as a basis for the foundation of American literature. In the place of a historically grounded period, she offers an open-ended scale enlargement that entangles the category of American literature in civilizational traditions, often non-Western, that are far older than the United States itself.31
Dimock’s release of American literature from the nationally derived confines of period represents the conceptual audacity of transnational work and its cosmopolitan aspirations to resist American exceptionalism, but the approach has faced criticism from those who see the devil in the details. Djelal Kadir historicizes Dimock’s refusal to historicize as an expression of U.S. imperial power, regardless of its good-faith attempts to counteract such power’s encroachment into the realm of literary study.32 Less-determinist appraisals have contemplated the purposes deep time might serve. Bruce Robbins asks what reactivating centuries of time might do our “planetary meta-narratives” and warns that scholars cannot assume the benefits of deep time without shouldering the hard work of historical analysis, the job of which is to meaningfully differentiate time so that progress and regress, violence and reparation can be measured and understood.33
Robbins’s criticism of Dimock’s concept begins with the presentation of her book’s opening anecdote, which would seem to compare American soldiers invading Iraq to Mongols. Robbins’s objection is not to the vilification of Americans but to the static use of the Mongols to signify barbarous action. I agree with Robbins that deep time makes it harder to historicize and easier to overlook comparisons that may perpetuate misconceptions and stereotypes. However, the comparison of Americans with Mongols, according to Dimock, is made by Iraqis, and the purpose of relating this is to emphasize American soldiers’ astonishment at the conflation. This distinction opens up an element of deep time that frontally addresses what historicist criticism deemphasizes: the perceptions of historical actors.
Through Other Continents begins with a tragedy—the looting and burning of the archives of the Iraqi National Library and the Islamic Library. These institutions housed documents collected over millennia by Mesopotamian civilizations. Rather than blame the looters, however, Dimock placed the onus on the U.S.-led coalition army, for failing to observe “the international law of belligerent occupation,” which demanded that they protect such sites of memory. Dimock invokes an event in recent history but narrates that event mythically. She does not detail the circumstances that made the destruction possible. Rather, she compresses those details to create a fable of American imperialism as barbarism—founded upon the disregard of knowledge and law.
The archives’ destruction functions as a primal moment for Dimock’s own project, crystallizing the need for deep time to explain how American and Iraqi perceptions of that destruction could be so intensely divided. Iraqis compared the American invasion to the Mongol invasion of 1258, which also resulted in the looting of archives, but Americans soldiers were dumbfounded by the comparison:
Modern Iraqis see the actions of the United States as yet another installment of that long-running saga: “The modern Mongols, the new Mongols did that. The Americans did that.” All of this made no sense to the marines. The year 1258 was long ago and far away. It is separate by 745 years from 2003. The United States has nothing to do with it.34
If Dimock is guilty of anything, it is of too confidently ventriloquizing Iraqi and American perspectives on the basis of a single quote (as Robbins himself notes), but she is not wrong to want to understand the collective sentiments out of which communication collapses. In identifying disparate concepts of time as the culprit behind intercultural misunderstanding, her aim is not to historicize the conflict but to show how ontologies of time structure the experience of history. Altering the ontology of time animating American literature, Dimock hopes to offer a conceptual rapprochement between the occupier’s linear time of forgetting (or never knowing) and the occupied’s recursive time of remembering.
The resonances between the deep time of world literature and anticolonial time become remarkably clear if we turn to an earlier essay by Robbins, which analyzed the uses of temporal scale not in terms of world literature but via the surprisingly overlapping agendas of human rights activists and humanists. Robbins perceptively argues that both wish to honor the victims of atrocity by making their suffering impervious to time’s passing. This is what Anil does when she remembers “twenty murdered women” instead of beautiful bells, and this is what anticolonial writers and critics do when they resist historicism as ideologically colonial.
Robbins uses Leslie Marmon Silko’s “oceanic” ontology of time to illustrate the anticolonial point of view, and I reproduce it here to show its resonance with Dimock’s deep time:
Time is an ocean, and so the fact that we’re all sitting here right now is very dependent on what happened five hundred years ago; and you can’t just say, “Aw, five hundred years ago, that’s way in the past.” No, that linearity, that emphasis of making time all strung out like a string, that’s political, that’s what colonialists do…. The colonialist always says, “Oh that was so long ago, we really can’t address the things that’ve happened.”…But [to] people who experience time as an ocean, what happened five hundred years ago is right here, just as much as what happened five minutes ago is right here. How can you say that five minutes ago is more important than five hundred years ago?35
Robbins argues against oceanic or deep time because of its potential for abuses in the wrong hands, such as those of the Serbians who rationalized present-day genocide in Kosovo on the basis of distant memories of Ottoman colonialism. Even in the right hands, Robbins posits, the deep time of remembered atrocity fetishizes remembrance as good-enough deed, while allowing the politics of selectivity intrinsic to public memory to persist unexamined or unarticulated: “No serious intellectual work could get done if there were not some assumptions about temporal scale, some standard deviation from moral absoluteness that helps us decide what or how or how much to remember and what or how or how much to forget. The present argument can be taken as first and foremost an invitation to make those assumptions explicit.”36
Robbins calls for an airing of investments that acknowledges the imperfection of selectivity in the humanistic work of remembering and forgetting. What deep and oceanic time make explicit about their theorists’ memory practices is that historical actors’ experiences of time matter to the historical project of remembering the past, intervening in the present, and measuring the distinctions between past and present. Like Dimock, Silko centralizes experience in her temporal formulations and insists that people’s everyday meaning-making processes be made visible and countable as part of history.
The virtue of these models of time, despite the very real dangers that Robbins and Kadir register, is the criticism that such models level against historicism’s more scientific tendencies to dismiss human forms of perception as debased or illogical and thus to discount them as worthy objects of analysis. Diverse ontologies of time clarify history’s embodiment in ways that historicism’s rationalizing procedures do not. As historian Joseph Mali has argued, a people’s “foundational myths” are “as real as the conditions and events in which they actually live.” It is the conviction that historical events cannot be fully grasped without grasping the “ultimate narratives” of their participants that differentiates a modernist recognition of myth from a postmodernist relativizing of truth claims. Mali’s claims are made on behalf of “mythistory,” a revisionist discourse within modern historiography. Heir to Herodotus rather than to Thucydides, it seeks to rehabilitate the practices of “imagination, fabulation, and memorization” as integral parts of the historical record, and thus considers hermeneutic reflection as vital as positivist observation to expressing concrete reality.37
The intellectual work that I attribute to Dimock’s deep time and Ondaatje’s aesthetics is mythistorical. It commands a vast temporal scale because it is attempting to answer the question “What happened?” in Iraq and Sri Lanka in a way that retains the irrational elements that persist, and arguably are magnified, in times of atrocity. By addressing themselves to what historicism does not, Dimock and Ondaatje recognize the endurance of myth as the basis of communal histories, and they see their projects as intervening in the mythological shape of their subjects. Deep time proposes a new origin story for American literature, founded upon entanglement rather than exceptionalism.
Ondaatje’s Collected Works of Billy the Kid prefigures that project and makes it explicitly mythistorical by taking up the national and global iconicity of Bonney as part of a transnationally circulating story of American identity. In Anil’s Ghost, Ondaatje illuminates the processes by which present-day conflicts appropriate the past. In drawing on the ancient, he lends insight into strategies of legitimation: Anil’s commitment to intervention based on the moral norms of human rights (“twenty murdered women”) versus Sarath’s commitment to grounding and perhaps suspending such norms on the basis of civilizational differences (“another world with its own value system”). China in 500 B.C., whether it normatively should be remembered in this context or not, is an unavoidable site of political force that reveals the foundations upon which historical actors lay their claims and defend their actions. The ancient is mobilized differently by competing epistemological projects, which in turn are shaped by distinct cultural attitudes. Ondaatje uses the Chinese ruin as a site of irreconcilable differences in how “we” remember and inhabit modernity. Its disputed significance conveys the messiness of the cosmopolitical force field: human rights activities are haunted by the legacy of Western imperialism, and postcolonial dissent to intervention is tainted by the propagandistic strategies of authoritarian, self-cannibalizing states.
The novel’s scenarios of remembrance compel us to weigh Sarath’s aestheticization of the deep past against Anil’s politicization of it. Both sides are imperfect, and that is the point. They represent ethics as informed by the condensations of experience and education, the witnessing of history, and the compromises that come with it all. The structure of Anil and Sarath’s dispute does nothing if not encourage oscillation between an investment in the particularities of cultural difference and a reluctance to allow cultural difference to neutralize the norm-making that enables ethical judgment and political action.
I think the novel courts this oscillation, especially in the passages that give it its archival form and multinational setting. On unnumbered pages, italicized, these passages interrupt the diegetic narrative, sometimes relating a past event unknown to Ondaatje’s main characters and at other times taking the form of a found object, such as a letter or record, that a character (usually Anil) may have left behind or come across in the course of an investigation. The passages’ visuality recalls the practices of collation and assembly that Ondaatje first used in Collected Works, and as in that text, the passages serve to enlarge the geography into which the main plot of establishing Sailor’s identity dissolves. To read these italicized passages together is to draw the Sri Lankan civil war into a transhistorical and transnational network of memory loss.
Ondaatje draws comparisons between the Sri Lankan killing fields and a raided Buddhist temple in China’s Shanxi province, where Japanese archaeologists had excised twenty-four Bodhisattva sculptures, the broken pieces of which sit in various museums in the West: “This was the place of a complete crime. Heads separated from bodies. Hands broken off” (Anil’s Ghost, 12). Ondaatje includes a “found letter” from Anil to a Hollywood film director—an artifact of her life in Texas with her girlfriend, Leaf, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s in the novel’s present: “We are forensic scientists and have been arguing about where on his body Mr. Marvin was shot” (258). Still another passage takes the form of a partial record of Sri Lanka’s disappeared:
Kumara Wijetunga, 17. 6th November 1989. At about 11:30 p.m. from his house.
Prabath Kumara, 16. 17th November 1989. At 3:20 a.m. from the home of a friend.
Kumara Arachchi, 16. 17th November 1989. At about midnight from his house.
The passage goes on to provide seven more names and then the following lines: “The colour of a shirt. The sarong’s pattern. The hour of disappearance” (41).
Sourced from Amnesty International reports, the passage purports to be a segment of the printed archive that Anil reads before discovering Sailor’s “archive of bones.”38 At one level, these names, combined with the other extradiegetic passages in the novel, suggest Benjaminian shards—pasts that defy assimilation into the narrative of continuity that Anil equates with returning Sailor to history (her ideal of justice) and that Sarath considers unattainable under conditions on the ground in Sri Lanka. At another level, these passages recall the comparative gestures made by Anil—in her debate with Sarath and in her examination of Sailor, through the prism of Laetoli, Vesuvius, and Hiroshima—those multiple sites of preservation that precede Sri Lanka’s and that highlight the destruction that motivates and humbles historical projects.
Ondaatje’s artifactual images (the Chinese temple, the Hollywood letter, and the record of the Sri Lankan missing) represent several incompatible orders of loss that the novel nonetheless asks us to consider together. Here, transnational memory leaves readers more helpless than partisan. We are faced not with choosing between Anil’s or Sarath’s world-views but with observing the moment before views coalesce into an ordered world. This is how Ondaatje evokes the sensation of being in the archive, in both of Foucault’s senses of the term. His formal organization acknowledges the mystery and disorientation of being among material stored but not storied; at the same time, it understands this moment as the fundamental ground of knowledge itself.
Despite his characters’ inclinations, Ondaatje’s archival method places Sailor within a network of locations from which no consistent narrative can be drawn without sacrifice or, to use Robbins’s word, selectivity. It thus makes the full disclosures that the characters cannot. Anil’s faith in universal truths (whether in the form of empirical facts or moral norms) and Sarath’s commitment to relative ones (in the form of historical contexts and situated values) lead them to tether Sailor’s fate to recognizable collectivities—the legal community of the human for Anil, and the failed nation-state for Sarath. Archival form, however, makes that tethering difficult because it articulates the unarticulated premises and analytic modes behind ethico-political convictions. By linking together discrepant geographies of loss and allowing all sorts of remains—shards, bones, letters, and records—to retain their fragmented form, Ondaatje evokes, indeed enunciates, the moment prior to enunciation even as his characters must necessarily attempt to overcome that moment to produce politically meaningful narratives.
Anil’s Ghost, then, despite its protagonist’s mission, slows Sailor’s return to the historical dead and pauses over its uses. He, like the quartet of animals, captures the imagination only as a spectral memory, and this raises the unnerving possibility that the Sri Lankan killing fields should not simply be politically diagnosed but should be kept preserved, as a “time-capsule of unhistorical lives.” The time capsule metaphor itself reveals why the novel is so frustrating to those who demand a historicist analysis of the Sri Lankan civil war rather than an aesthetics of its material remains. The time capsule, as a mode of preservation, conjures the human, all too human aspects of preservation: objects of selection that align personal importance with sociological significance; direct attempts to control how one’s present will appear to future recipients; an attempt to freeze time in a box and bury it.39
These attitudes toward time all threaten to disqualify the contents of a time capsule as objects of historical knowledge because of their notional and idiosyncratic qualities. Yet it is the implicit normativity of what constitutes good, usable material that Ondaatje tests by valuing the intimacy between time capsules and popular remembrance, between the archaeology of knowledge and archival form. He responds to the Sri Lankan civil war—an event that seems to be nothing if not internal to the nation—by asserting that a larger and less uniform geography might be necessary to understand, if not the specific course of the nation’s violence, then its citizens’ exposure to violence, which cannot be remembered, harnessed, integrated, or, most importantly, redressed by a linear historical narrative that delegitimizes alternative temporal structures. He sacrifices causality and demystification within the national context in favor of correlation and comparison across transnational and transhistorical fields in order to hold Anil’s Ghost accountable to those people whose stories are erased by the facticity needed to achieve international legal recognition. This is why, when we finally learn Sailor’s “real” identity—that is, when Anil succeeds in turning the skeleton into Ruwan Kumara, a “representative of race and age and place”—the information is treated untriumphantly and is quickly laid aside. The novel continues to refer to Kumara as Sailor even after Anil has made the skeleton a member of the “historical dead,” and it continues to turn Sri Lanka’s communal future away from broken state apparatuses and toward technologies of myth-making that will address national fissures by appealing to older and wider kinds of collectivity.
The novel channels this commitment to myth into an ending that may be nostalgic for the ancientness of the ancient, but it uses that nostalgia critically to engage the possibility of national reconstruction and reconciliation. The final pages of Anil’s Ghost feature Ananda restoring a vandalized and shattered statue of the Buddha in yet another sacred site that, though supposedly “neutral” and “innocent,” had become a killing field during the war (Anil’s Ghost, 300). Throughout the novel, Ananda’s artistic skills foil Anil’s scientific ones; his first task—to construct a model of Sailor’s face for identification purposes—foreshadows his final task of restoring the Buddha. Ananda’s rendering of Sailor, we learn earlier in the novel, does not resemble any one person but is rather a projection of his grief at having lost his wife in the war: “He [Sarath] would already know as she [Anil] did that no one would recognize the face. It was not a reconstruction of Sailor’s face they were looking at” (188).
Ananda’s first sculpture, then, reinforces Sailor’s symbolic function within the novel as the icon of national fracture and collective trauma, a symbolism that his last sculpture, the Buddha, will attempt to both exorcise and memorialize: “The [Buddha’s] eyes, like his [Ananda’s] at this moment, would always look north. As would the great scarred face half a mile away, which he had helped knit together from damaged stone, a statue that was no longer a god, that no longer had its graceful line but only the pure sad glance Ananda had found” (306). This passage embeds the national fissures of Sri Lanka in the Buddha’s gaze north, a muted reference to the largely Hindu Tamil separatist region where fighting had begun. The cracked face of the statue (“no longer a god”) keeps alive the deformation of religious values under the majority Buddhist Sinhalese government.
The critical appeal of the reconstructed statue lies in the way it changes the object of nostalgia from the nation itself to the nation’s now complex position within the transnational and even transhistorical net that Buddhism casts throughout the novel: in the stolen bodhisattvas from Shanxi and in the sacred sites within Sri Lanka, themselves older than the nation. The archival passages of Anil’s Ghost and Sailor’s archive of bones resolve inside the scarred totality of the sculpture. Buddhism’s association with the persecution of Hindu Tamils makes it undeniably problematic as the novel’s concluding symbol of national reconciliation, yet the conditions of the statue’s restoration are hopeful. It is only by disaffiliating the Buddha from the Sinhalese state by having a victim of that state repair it, and by tying it to a supranational geography, that Ondaatje can make a claim for its unifying power taking precedence over its ethnocentric deployment and corruption.
The difficulties of such a utopian vision are clear: Ondaatje arguably re-silences Sailor (this time mythically, not historically) by replacing the skeleton with the Buddha as the novel’s final image of social recovery. Yet it is worth considering Sailor’s muteness as a reminder of present actors’ limits in the face of the past’s otherness. Whether they are historians, scientists, writers, or visual artists, the most Ondaatje and his protagonists can do is mediate how the past resonates with the present, and that mediation entails bringing different degrees of the past (recent versus ancient) and different kinds of remembering (mythical versus historical) into meaningful convergence. The sacred statue’s implication in historical violence shows its susceptibility to resignification, but such resignifying is also what holds out the possibility of Buddhism’s rehabilitation within Sri Lanka. By showing how enduring myths can also change, Ondaatje’s archival legends help readers to appreciate the coherence that myth provides but to question any notion of ossification in myth’s persistence through cultural memory.
The structure of Anil’s Ghost works against such ossification when we consider that it has not one but several endings. In the first ending, Anil leaves Sri Lanka, contemplating her own place in the Western media’s narcissistic narratives of heroism: “American movies, English books—remember how they all end?…The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it. The camera leaves with him” (Anil’s Ghost, 285). Another ending takes the form of an encounter between Sarath’s brother, Gamini, and Sarath’s corpse, after Sarath has been tortured and murdered for aiding Anil. The third and penultimate ending features a public riot in Sri Lanka in which the president is assassinated—perhaps the result of Anil’s report, although the novel does not specify this. To read the novel as displaying, perhaps even archiving, several endings rather than settling for one recalls The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, in which the sense of an ending was precisely unending. Each artifact in that work promised to extend and disable Billy’s concrete definition by generating continual reinterpretations, and every ending in Anil’s Ghost extends Sailor’s reverberations over those who would form an interpretive community around him.40
Billy and Sailor thus take shape through the projections of their many authors and artifactual remains. Indeed, their importance to Ondaatje’s transnational dissection and renovation of national mythologies depends precisely on their remaining legends, as opposed to becoming the real (in the positivist sense) William Bonney and Ruwan Kumara. The archive as a formal paradigm enables Ondaatje to experiment with both the proliferation of cultural artifacts in the American context and the dearth of information in the Sri Lankan one. Moreover, it enables him to use the polarities of these cases to stage a larger examination of collective memory’s capacity to shift and multiply the scales of imagined community: national, international, human. Where one would expect specific national identities to be shored up by a return to recognizable icons (the American outlaw of Collected Works and the Sri Lankan Buddha that replaces Sailor at the end of Anil’s Ghost), Ondaatje’s archival legends change the collectivity to be renewed and the apertures by which the national and the international become plausible attachments. They divert national symbols through transnational geographies not only to multiply the number of groups that may lay claim to them but also to blur the boundaries among those groups.
This strategy of reinscription is an important one for cultivating coalitional thinking about collective memory, an invitation that Michael Rothberg has already extended through his concept of “multidirectional memory.” Rothberg cogently argues that memory, particularly public memory, is too often perceived in terms of competition for scarce resources. To jar that entrenched understanding, he conceives a model based on the “interplay of disparate acts of remembrance,” in which one group’s memories might help lend meaning and value to another’s.41 By defamiliarizing figures of nostalgia for one group and showing their interception by another, Ondaatje begins the slow and multidirectional process of separating collective pasts from isolationist paradigms of community and from the myths of origin, lineage, and belonging that they sustain.
L. P. Hartley famously wrote, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”42 Ondaatje’s archival legends revive this striking metaphor of the strangeness of personal memory and transpose it to the domain of the political and the transnational, literalizing it in the process. Collected Works and Anil’s Ghost show what national pasts might look like when formulated through foreign countries; they reinterpret the boundaries of cultural memory and discover that the past moves at differential rates. Over to some and ongoing to others, the past is essential to collective self-definition. Ondaatje’s literary works grapple with its phenomenological density and preserve those subaltern modes of retrospection that might otherwise go unseen and unfelt in materialist histories of conflict.43 His modernist project retains internationalism’s critical edge without sacrificing or simplifying its sentimental ends.
