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• Not important to try and choose which story you prefer, which version of Rochester and Antoinette/Bertha you believe or can justify

• What is important is that Rhys felt compelled to write a life for Bertha, to keep her from being a flat character. As Rhys says, the original Bertha was “not once alive”

• Rhys shows us the perspective of the colonial subject who is also a feminist

• As Antoinette says, “’There is always the other side, always’” (77)

• The novel forces us to abandon, or at least revisit, the canonical view of Rochester

• We see him as having exploited Antoinette for her money and rather than taking off for England and leaving her to fend for herself in Jamica, drugging her and locking her up, leaving her to total ruin, physically, emotionally, psychologically

• Could see her getting revenge in the same way that the Marlow metaphorically suggests that the landscape in Heart of Darkness wrecks havoc on Kurtz in retribution

• Lack of power for women is foregrounded; even someone as affluent as Antoinette is trapped by circumstances

• Yet, Christophine has no financial security and controls her own life

• Also see the ways in which Rochester is limited by the economic, class, race and gender systems –

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Modernism and Narrative Strategies

• Loose threads from A Passage to Indiaand Wide Sargasso Sea

Modernist Literature• Writing often experimental, innovative in form• Development of stream of consciousness,

subjective point of view• Lack of linear narrative and conventional plot of

beginning, middle, and end• Lack of closure and conventional ending• Irregular or lack of punctuation• Reality is no longer conceived of as neutral and

universal• Self-conscious; authors often involved in

commentary on writing process• Intertextual references (classical, historical,

literary, popular culture, media, music, art)

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• Form to mirror content (show and tell)• Confounds reader’s expectations; may

lack accessibility• Use of “high” and “low” cultural forms• May see angst at loss of transcendent

values and continued search

Wide Sargasso Sea• Abrupt transitions between time periods• Instead, foregrounding of individual perspectives• Rendered through first person narrative Provides the post colonial

and feminist frame of reference of Antoinette in part I• In part II, speaker is never actually identified; we only know that he

is Mr. Rochester if we ‘get’ the intertextual reference to Jane Eyre• Use of the intertextual reference allows Rhys to speak back to the

dominant culture and disrupt it• Rochester’s perspective is decentred; in reading Jane Eyre we align

ourselves with Mr. Rochester and the perspective of the white, upper class male of English descent

• Returning to Antoinette/Bertha’s first person account moves Brontë’s Bertha from the periphery to the centre

• Also see how Rochester is implicated in the system and constrained

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Modernism and A Passage to India

• Novel published in the period of high modernism (mid-1920s)

• Content reflects modernist angst –• Indeterminacy of the middle section, “Caves,” can be

seen to mimic the confusion felt in early twentieth century with changing social mores, values, forms of representation (form mirrors content)

• Rendering of multiple subjectivities• Colonialism seem from the perspective of the colonized,

even if realized through an Anglo writer • Additionally, occasionally, see the narrative fall into free

and indirect discourse

• Free and indirect discourse: see both the character’s direct speech and the narrator’s indirect account as a means of revealing a character’s point of view

• Characterized by the neutral perspective of the narrator and the tone and perspective of individual characters

• May be difficult to determine whose point of view is being rendered

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• Sometimes hear the ‘neutral’ account of the narrator and sometimes hear the particular nuances or figures of speech associated with a particular character

• Effect is to give the reader a more authentic and immediate sense of a character’s point of view

• Used by Jane Austen to provide irony, because the reader is allowed to see what a character may not yet know; the reader gets additional information

• But in modernist novels, typically used to reveal multiple realities

“Ronny was tempted to retort; he knew the type; he knew all the types, and this was the spoilt westernized. But he was a servant of the Government, it was his job to avoid ‘íncidents,’ so he said nothing, and ignored the provocation that Aziz continued to offer. Aziz was provocative. Everything he said had an impertinent flavour or jarred. His wings were failing, but he refused to fall without a struggle. He did not mean to be impertinent to Mr Heaslop, who had never done him harm, but here was an Anglo-Indian who must become a man before comfort could be regained. He did not mean to be greasily confidential to Miss Quested, only to enlist her support; not to be loud and jolly to Professor Godbole. A strange quartet – he fluttering to the ground, she puzzled by the sudden ugliness, Ronny fuming, the Braham observing all three, but with downcast eyes and hands folded, as if nothing was noticeable. A scene from a play, thought Fielding, who now saw them from the distance across the garden, grouped among the blue pillars of his beautiful hall” (70).

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“Ronny was tempted to retort; he knew the type; he knew all the types, and this was the spoilt westernized. But he was a servant of the Government, it was his job to avoid ‘íncidents,’ so he said nothing, and ignored the provocation that Aziz continued to offer.Aziz was provocative. Everything he said had an impertinent flavour or jarred. His wings were failing, but he refused to fall without a struggle. He did not mean to be impertinent to Mr Heaslop, who had never done him harm, but here was an Anglo-Indian who must become a man before comfort could be regained. He did not mean to be greasily confidential to Miss Quested, only to enlist her support; not to be loud and jolly to Professor Godbole. A strange quartet – he fluttering to the ground, she puzzled by the sudden ugliness, Ronny fuming, the Braham observing all three, but with downcast eyes and hands folded, as if nothing was noticeable. A scene from a play, thought Fielding, who now saw them from the distance across the garden, grouped among the blue pillars of his beautiful hall” (70).

• f.i.d. creates a reality that is not unified, but made up of multiple perspectives

• In Forster, we can see how free and indirect discourse can disrupt the imperial discourse; the reader sees Aziz’s motivations, Adela’s confusion, Fielding’s detached sense of watching a drama

• When Aziz is described, we initially hear Ronny’s judgment of him and then it seems as though the tone of the passage changes and Aziz’s voice slips in

• The sensation is one of moving in and out of the minds of many characters without having the “he said” or “she said” intrusion of the narrator

• Prevents us from valuing one perspective over another; can’t claim a singular reality as the story

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The English Patient

• Our first postmodern text• Our first text by a Canadian author

Postmodernism vs. Postmodernity

• Aesthetic movement vs. system of thought

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Postmodernism

• Parody• Pastiche• Bricolage (elements from others styles and periods)• Questioning of idea of progress; no longer see science

and technology as unquestionably able to improve our lives (super bugs)

• Reject notion of a ‘grand, totalizing narrative’- no one story we can all tell and rely upon that uniformly renders reality for all of us

• No real – just copies• ‘Death’ of history,

• Angst of modernism replaced by irony, sometimes playfulness

• Interest in binary structures or polarities of self/other or centre/margin

• Modernist interest in intertextuality

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The English Patient

• Set in Cairo, England, Libyan desert, outskirts of Florence

• Based partially on historical figures (eg. Count Almasy, a Hungarian spy and explorer) and fictional characters

• Some characters carry over from earlier works (eg Caravaggio)

• Filled with references to not only other fictional works, but also fragments of songs, poems, references to visual art

• Moves through several time periods, but non-chronologically

The English Patient• Non-linear narrative, • Ondaatje has described it as a ‘mosaic’: “I don’t believe

stories are told from A to Z anymore; or, if they are, they become very ponderous. I’m used to commercial breaks. We discover stories in a different way. I discover something about you after knowing you X number of years, and then after thirty years I will find out some other changes that occurred five years earlier. That sense of discovery, of memory, and how we reveal ourselves to each other – none of that is chronological. Hana will read twenty pages of a book to the poor Patient, and then she’ll read on to herself, and then carry on aloud twenty pages later, and he’s utterly lost the plot. I like that” (Interview with Eleanor Wachtel, Essays in Canadian Writing 53 1994: 258).

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Michael Ondaatje brief biography

• B. 12 September 1943 in Kegalle, Ceylon, now Sri Lanka• Birth name Philip Michael Ondaatje• Father Philip Mervyn Ondaatje• Enid Doris Gratien Ondaatje• Paternal Grandfather had a tea plantation• Mother moved to London with his brother and sister in

1948, apparently due to his father’s alcoholism

• Ondaatje attended St. Thomas College in Colombo• 1952 – his mother sent for him and he attended Dulwich

College, a British public school• Did not see his father after this point• 1962 – immigrated to Canada to join brother,

Christopher • Attended Bishop’s University in Lonnoxville, Quebec• 1964 – married Betty “Kim” Jones, an artist and they

have two sons, Quintin and Griffin• 1965 – Received a B.A. from U of Toronto• 1967 – received M.A. from Queen’s University • 1967 – The Dainty Monsters, first book of poetry

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• 1970 – Governor General’s Award for The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems

• Post-1970, he was hired as an assistant professor of English at York University, produced, directed and wrote three movies ( Carry On Crime and Punishment, Sons of Captain Poetry, and The Clinton Special), and Rat Jelly, a collection of poetry

• 1976 – Coming Through Slaughter – biographical fiction• 1979 - There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do:

Poems (Governor General’s Award)• Separated from his first wife in 1980; began living with

Linda Spalding, a social worker turned novelist• 1982 – Running in the Family – mock autobiography

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• 1984 – Secular Love, poetry• He and Spalding take over editorship of Brick: A Literary

Journal• In the Skin of a Lion (1987)• The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems (1989)• 1992 – The English Patient – won the Booker Prize,

became an Academy Award winning movie (1996)• 1998 – Handwriting, poetry• 2000 – Anil’s Ghost (Giller Prize, Prix Médicis)• 2007 - Divisidero

• Consider an extended intertextualreference in The English Patient to Heart of Darkness

• See the following points of intersection

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• Individual (pilgrim) makes a perilous journey to unknown location

• Seeks a man of mystery• Man of mystery is living in derelict conditions• Mystery man is of international heritage• He has an uncertain morality with a gift for spoken

language• He is a skilled writer• Mystery man is ill• Nurse is also foreign• Mystery man goes ‘native’• Carries a mysterious guidebook• Similarities between the mystery man and the pilgrim

Our pilgrim makes a perilous journey to a foreign location.• HD: “I got my appointment – of course; and I got it very

quick. It appears the company had received news that one of their captains had been killed in a scuffle with the natives. This was my chance, and it made me the more anxious to go” (6).

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

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

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2. The pilgrim seeks a man of mystery. • HD: “’ In the interior you will no doubt meet Mr. Kurtz.’

On my asking who Mr. Kurtz was, he said he was a first-class agent; and seeing my disappointment at this information, he added slowly, laying down his pen, ‘He is a very remarkable person’” (16)

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

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

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

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

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

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• HD: Kurtz’s hut is surrounded by decapitated, shrunken heads on stakes

• EP: the villa is surrounded by statues without heads and limbs (EP 43)

4. The man of mystery is also a foreigner, of mixed nationality. He is educated partly in England.

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

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

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5. The mystery man fascinates everyone around him. He is of uncertain morality. Gifted intellectually, he is known for his speaking skills. He recites poetry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. His nurse is another foreigner.• HD: the Russian “had managed to nurse Kurtz through

two illnesses….” (91)

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

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9. The mystery man “goes native” • HD: his “nerves went wrong, and caused him to preside

at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites…” (83)

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

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

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

• EP: “And in his commonplace book, his 1890 edition of Herodotus’ Histories, are other fragments, - maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books“ (96),

• “…his guidebook, ancient and modern, of supposed lies. When he discovered the truth to what had seemed a lie, he brought out his glue pot and pasted in a map or news clipping….” (246).

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

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

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

12. similarities of geography• HD: “…you lost your way on that river as you would in a

desert….” (59)

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

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• Why would Ondaatje do a “riff” on Conrad’s book? Is he paying it homage? Or critiquing it?