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 上海外国语大学
博士学位论文

文学想象中的世界主义
——翁达杰小说研究

院系：英语学院

学科专业：英语语言文学

姓名:谢涛

指导教师：周敏 教授

2018 年 5 月
 Shanghai International Studies University

COSMOPOLITANISM IN LITERARY IMAGINATION: A STUDY

OF MICHAEL ONDAATJE’S MAJOR NOVELS

A Dissertation Submitted to the School of English Studies

In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for

The Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

By Xie Tao

Under the Supervision of Professor Zhou Min

May 2018
 答辩委员会成员

主席：李维屏（上海外国语大学教授、博士生导师）

成员：虞建华（上海外国语大学教授、博士生导师）

金衡山（华东师范大学教授、博士生导师）

张和龙（上海外国语大学教授、博士生导师）

朱振武（上海师范大学教授、博士生导师）
 Acknowledgements

This project could not have been completed without the exceptional guidance
and unwavering support of my supervisor, Professor Zhou Min. I owe an enormous
debt of gratitude to her. She helped me develop my ideas and pursue my interest in
Michael Ondaatje. Her living example will remain a source of lasting inspiration for
me. It is such a blessing to be her student.
I would like to extend my thanks to Professor Li Weiping, Professor Yu Jianhua,
Professor Jin Hengshan, Professor Zhang Helong and Professor Zhu Zhenwu for their
time and insights at my defense.
Sincere thanks to all my teachers at SISU whose enlightening classes have
guided us to traverse the less trodden path of literature.
I am grateful to Professor Anne Luyat who wrote to me about Michael Ondaatje
in an e-mail three years ago.
A big thanks goes to my friends, both near and far, for being there for me.
Finally, all my thanks to my family, especially my parents, my wife and my sister
for their unconditional love through this long journey. I would like to thank my aunt
and my grandmother who have shown me nothing but love ever since my childhood.
Thank you, SISU.

I
 摘要

“世界主义”的哲学思想源远流长，从古希腊到启蒙时代直至现在，人们对
其不断阐发，如今已囊括“文化根源”、“他者”、“移情”以及“悦纳异己”
等多层次的概念。随着全球化的纵深发展，“日渐紧密”却又“分歧长存”构成
了当今世界的内在矛盾，也使得“世界主义”这一概念再次活跃起来。加拿大著
名小说家迈克尔•翁达杰（1943-），凭借其个人的流散经历以及多元文化生活状
况，在小说创作中超越了后殖民文学中如“文明与野蛮”、“理性与非理性”、
“先进与落后”、“科学与迷信”等二元对立的书写，建构了以“差异并非问题
而是机遇”以及“移情的道德教化”为内涵的世界主义话语。
本论文以世界主义中“文化根源”、“他者”、“移情”以及“好客”等概
念为思想背景，借助后殖民理论、后现代美学与史观、以及文化研究中的“身份
认同”等相关理论，以四部翁达杰小说（《身着狮皮》、《英国病人》、《安尼尔的
鬼魂》、《猫桌》）为研究对象，在文本细读的基础之上，对翁达杰作品中的世界
主义思想进行考察。
论文除引言和结论之外，论文的主干部分由四章构成。导言部分简要地回顾
了翁达杰的成长脉络和创作概括，梳理了国内外研究现状，旨在使读者能更加深
入地认识翁达杰小说写作思想的渊源。此外，导言部分还对世界主义概念及其意
义嬗变予以耙梳与提炼，以此确定了本论文的基本理论框架。
第一章围绕翁达杰的早期代表作《身着狮皮》展开。本章从《身着狮皮》中
世界主义本体建构入手，探讨了小说中的文化接触主题。在《身着狮皮》中，翁
达杰通过对上世纪初多伦多工业化历史的重塑，不仅指明跨国、跨文化交际在全
球化语境下业已成为常态，批评了多元文化政策下的种族歧视与社会失衡，还暗
示对另一种处理差异的思想框架的急切需求。小说着重表现一个无法叙事却渴望
对话的个体，如何在流动经历中实现对差异的认知。此外，小说与史诗《吉尔伽
美什》形成的互文结构，为翁达杰希望通过小说创作实现东西文化接触时做到
“和实生物，同则不继”的愿景提供了实践场域，进而形成了差异并非问题而是
机遇的世界主义的思想雏形。
第二章聚焦《英国病人》中因创伤而聚到一起的四位身份迥异的个体，分析

II
了小说中的民族主义与无根世界主义主题。小说中，于废墟之上所建立的共同体，
有别于基于对过去共同的想象而建立起来的民族共同体，前者更着眼于当下的共
同需要以及对未来的共同愿景。在此，共同体成员在差异边界上展开对话，得以
消解因差异而生的壁垒。翁达杰将阅读小说作为认知差异建构的方式，从而实现
在阅读中实践世界主义这一创新之举。《英国病人》中，翁达杰通过回忆这一流
动叙事策略，对民族与战争之间的关联进行解构，并提出了“国际混血儿”这一
带有欺骗性的无根世界主义概念。翁达杰并不认可无根世界主义具有消除战争的
力量，并在小说后半部对其进行了反思与批判，质疑了这一概念中抛弃文化根源
的主张。进而为下一部小说的有根世界主义埋下了伏笔。
第三章运用后现代历史观，阅读和评析了翁达杰小说中最受争议的一部作品
《安妮尔的鬼魂》。翁达杰在这部小说中对差异的认知更为深入，从文化及民族
差异的视域拓宽至性别差异。安尼尔不惜以乱伦为代价，颠覆父权压制，成为翁
达杰进入女性世界主义探讨的有力支撑。翁达杰的小说并非为学者诟病的那样是
“非政治”的创作，他采用的实为“迂回式”的政治介入。翁达杰通过塑造逆向
流散人物安妮尔，充分呈现身份的社会建构本质，希望以此促进针对差异而展开
的积极对话。安尼尔最终收获了塞拉斯的认可，反映出翁达杰对世界主义公民的
建构，是一种以保留文化根源为前提，从单一身份出发，最终构建出混合身份的
积极设想。
第四章从世界主义成长小说这一视角，细读翁达杰具有浓厚自传色彩的《猫
桌》。本章认为，在儿童的意识中，文化植入尚在雏形期，翁达杰以儿童作为书
写对象，就可以将世界主义本体的建构过程置放在显微镜下予以观察。因此，
《猫
桌》这部小说放大了翁达杰在上述三部小说中呈现的世界主义思想在个体意识中
的整个演化过程。笔者通过盖内普人类学概念“过渡仪式”以及旅行文学的双重
视角，探析少年迈克尔在为期三周的航海之旅中收获的差异启蒙与历经的主体建
构。成长小说本与民族主义培养关联紧密，翁达杰却在该文学体裁中实现了世界
主义对差异的拥抱与移情的道德教化，这无疑是对其世界主义思想的戏剧性放大。
结论部分指出，翁达杰通过小说创作反思世界主义的思想和哲学，超越了后
殖民主义中二元对立的僵局，促进了世界主义话语的建构。这是一个从世界主义
本体，到无根世界主义，再到有根世界主义的认识过程。

III
 本文将翁达杰的小说艺术置放在世界主义研究全球发展、人类命运共同体逐
步获得国际共识的大背景下，为世界主义理论在中国语境内的传播与运用提供了
一种中国视角。而从“单一”到“杂糅”的过程，正是世界主义的内核所在。翁
达杰小说中对于移情的道德教化，对文学阅读与文学批评积极参与命运共同体建
构亦指明了其理论基础与实践途径。

关键词：迈克尔•翁达杰；世界主义；差异；移情；人类命运共同体

IV
 Abstract

With the widening, deepening and speeding up of globalization, the world has
become tightly interconnected, and paradoxically divided. Due to its elaboration on
cultural roots, difference, empathy and hospitality, the ancient concept
cosmopolitanism has once again come to the discursive center of scholars,
philosophers and writers. Among them is Michael Ondaatje (1943-), one of the most
renowned contemporary Canadian writers. The Canadian multicultural society breeds
a new structure of thought in his novels that transcends post-colonial discourse’s
emphasis on binary oppositions. Openness to difference and the cultivation of
empathy, two of core issues of cosmopolitanism, find powerful representations in his
works.
This dissertation explores the cosmopolitan subjects represented in Ondaatje’s
four major novels—In the Skin of a Lion (1987), The English Patient (1992), Anil’s
Ghost (2000) and The Cat’s Table (2011). Drawing upon postcolonial theories and
postmodern aesthetics, through a close reading of Ondaatje’s cosmopolitan writings,
this dissertation sketches and locates a navigational route of Ondaatje’s novels: the
cosmopolitan self, rootless cosmopolitanism and rooted cosmopolitanism.
Apart from the introduction and the conclusion, this dissertation consists of four
chapters. The introduction offers a general review of Ondaatje’s fiction and life, and a
critical literature review of his works both at home and abroad. In addition, a
genealogy of cosmopolitanism, which establishes the basic theoretical framework of
this dissertation, is included in the introductory part.
Chapter One studies the construction of the cosmopolitan self in In the Skin of a
Lion. By reconstructing Toronto in the early twentieth century, Ondaatje criticizes the
racism and social imbalance in the multicultural society. He reflects upon the need for
an alternative structure of thought towards difference in the age when transnational
and cross-cultural interactions have become a norm. The protagonist’s inability to talk
and his desire for conversation provide the momentum for him to travel and interact

V
with others, enabling him to reconceive the self and the other. The intertextuality
between this novel and The Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2100 BC) embodies Ondaatje’s
primitive model of cosmopolitanism that difference should be regarded as an
opportunity rather than a problem to be solved.
Chapter Two focuses on the four traumatized characters in The English Patient
and examines the theme of nationalism and rootless cosmopolitanism. Different from
Anderson’s community of the nation-state, which is based on the imagination of a
shared past, the community in the novel is formed to get through the difficult present
and strive for a shared future. Ondaatje innovatively approaches reading as a way of
community building and regards reading itself as a cosmopolitan practice. In The
English Patient, Ondaatje uses the fluid concept of memory as a narrative structure to
deconstruct the relationship between nation-state and human conflicts. Though
Ondaatje proposes the deceptive idea of rootless cosmopolitan, or “international
bastard”, he questions its potential to quench the flames of violence. The second half
of the novel criticizes the detachment from one’s cultural roots, which is a prelude to
the concept of rooted cosmopolitan in Anil’s Ghost.
Chapter Three reads Ondaatje’s most controversial novel Anil’s Ghost and shows
how Ondaatje broadens his conceptualization of difference to the realm of gender. At
the cost of incest, Anil rejects the expected identity for women in the patriarchal
society. In response to criticism that Anil’s Ghost is “apolitical”, this study points out
that Ondaatje has a habit of detour with his political writing. The novel constructs a
milieu to reflect upon the origin of ethnical conflicts in Sri Lanka and the possibility
of healing at the individual level. Through the creation of Anil, a reverse-diaspora,
Ondaatje unravels the construction of her identity ， which invites interrogation and
conversation on the role difference plays in the process. The Sri Lankan
anthropologist Sarath’s acceptance of Anil in the end reveals Ondaatje’s vision of
cosmopolitan as someone who can keep their cultural roots yet still embrace hybridity
at the same time.
Chapter Four approaches Ondaatje’s heavily autobiographical novel, The Cat’s
Table, as a cosmopolitan Bildungsroman in its consideration of how Ondaatje uses the
VI
innocence of the adolescent narrator Michael as a metaphor to dramatize the
construction of the cosmopolitan self. Reading against Arnaold Van Gennep’s concept
“a rite of passage”, this chapter traces Michael’s construction of self while interacting
with strangers during the three-week sea voyage, revealing the initiation of difference
he receives on the ship. Ondaatje boldly launches his cosmopolitan project in a genre
that has been associated with the cultivation of nationalism, which is undoubtedly a
dramatization of his proposition of embracing difference as an opportunity and his
appreciation of cultivating empathy.
The concluding section briefly summarizes the main arguments of the
dissertation, pointing out that Ondaatje’s novels deconstructs many stereotyped
binaries. It also generalizes the development of the cosmopolitan thinking in his
literary imagination.
In short, this dissertation attempts to study Ondaatje’s fiction in the context of
globally flourishing studies of cosmopolitanism and the recognition of a Community
of Shared Future with the expectation to offer a Chinese perspective to the global
discussion of cosmopolitanism and Ondaatje’s works. The transformation from
singular to hybridity is true to the development of the concept as well. That
Ondaatje’s fiction emphasizes on the cultivation of empathy through reading sheds
light on the positive role that reading and literary criticism can play in the
construction of a Community of Shared Future.

Key Words: Michael Ondaatje; cosmopolitanism; difference; empathy; a community

of shared future

VII
 Abbreviations

As Ondaatje’s works are often cited, for convenience’s sake, they are abbreviated
as follows：
SL In the Skin of a Lion
EP The English Patient
AG Ani’s Ghost
CT The Cat’s Table

VIII
 Contents

Acknowledgements....................................................................................................... I

摘要...............................................................................................................................II

Abstract........................................................................................................................ V

Abbreviations.......................................................................................................... VIII

Introduction.................................................................................................................. 1

Chapter One The Cosmopolitan Self in In the Skin of a Lion................................ 23

1.1 The Cosmopolitan Self........................................................................................................24

1.2 Cosmopolitanism from Below............................................................................................ 33

1.3 The Donning of the Skin.....................................................................................................43

Chapter Two The Rootless Cosmopolitanism in The English Patient....................49

2.1 An Alternative to Nationalism............................................................................................ 51

2.2 “International Bastards”......................................................................................................56

2.3 Reading as a Cosmopolitan Practice...................................................................................63

Chapter Three The Rooted Cosmopolitanism in Anil’s Ghost............................... 74

3.1 Cosmofeminism.................................................................................................................. 77

3.2 Doctor the Sweet Touch from the World............................................................................ 85

3.3 Cosmopolitan Patriot.......................................................................................................... 91

Chapter Four A Cosmopolitan Community in The Cat’s Table..............................98

4.1 Cosmopolitan Bildungsroman.......................................................................................... 100

4.2 A Cosmopolitan Self and a Cosmopolitan Community.................................................... 112

Conclusion.................................................................................................................122

Bibliography............................................................................................................. 127
 Introduction

Michael Ondaatje was born into the Burgher community of Dutch origin in 1943,
Kegalle, Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon. Like his fiction, his ancestry is hybrid in
nature, with a mixture of Dutch, Sinhalese, and Tamil. At the age of eleven, he left for
England to reunite with his divorced mother. He immigrated to Canada in1962 to
pursue his college education, receiving his BA from the University of Toronto in 1965
and his MA from the Queen’s University in 1967. The nomadism he experienced as a
child and an adolescent cultivated in him an openness for difference and an empathy
for strangers.
Ondaatje started off writing poems and first gained his literary reputation as a
poet. He won great acclaim with the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 1970
and 1979. His early books of poetry include The Dainty Monsters (1967), The Man
with Seven Toes (1969), and Rat Jelly (1973). In 1970, he wrote a collage of poetry
and prose, entitled The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems with the
notorious American outlaw being its protagonist, which won him his first Governor
General’s Award.
His first novel Coming Through Slaughter tells of the factual and fictional life of
New Orleans jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden. Ondaatje published In the Skin of a Lion in
1987, which re-writes the silenced history of the immigrant workers who had made
huge contribution in the building of Toronto from 1900 to 1940. Ondaatje explores the
confluence of culture from below and reveals an early attempt to engage in the
cultivation of cosmopolitanism in his literary imagination.
In 1992, Michael Ondaatje became the first Canadian writer to garner the Booker
Prize, the British Commonwealth’s highest literary honor for The English Patient
(1992). It was adapted for the Academy Award winning movie under the same title.
The novel explores a cast of four traumatized characters in the wake of the Second
World. The interactions between the four distinct characters initiate vital questions
concerning the problem of solidarity and imperialism.

1
 Anil’s Ghost (2000) was written as a response to the Sri Lankan Civil War.
Through a human rights investigation of a skeleton buried in a government-protected
preserve, Ondaatje engages in the political discussion on the personal level, revealing
the urgent task of healing.
The Cat’s Table (2011) has not yet received enough attention from scholars. This
is partly because this novel is more of a collection of loosely connected vignettes
centering on a maritime journey of a young boy named Michael. As a cosmopolitan
Bildungsroman, the novel dramatizes the construction of a cosmopolitan self and
navigates through the cultural and ideological disparity.
Also in Ondaatje’s dazzling repertoire are films, poetry and photography. As one
of the best Canadian writers, he “rivals Margaret Atwood in international fame”
(Hammill 159). Ondaatje is acclaimed for his evolving experiments with
postmodernist narrative and “the intensity and lyricism of poetry” (Hammill 159). His
fiction is hybrid in nature. He has developed his trademark Cubist narrative, craftily
using elements of photography, poetry, mythology in the reflexive search for the
cultivation of cosmopolitanism. The Cubist style allows Ondaatje to replace the
traditional linear, singular perspective with a structure that can simultaneously
operates on multiple planes. The spatial and temporal fluidity is a trademark feature of
Ondaatje’s works. Cubism defies any fixed locale, though never forsaking it
completely. An investigation into the Cubist style of Ondaatje’s fiction lends facility
for us to comprehend his literary representation of transnational experience that is
characteristic of the globalizing world.
Given Ondaatje’s background, he is often deemed as a postcolonial author. But
this categorization cannot fully express Ondaatje’s uniqueness. Ondaatje has been
consistent breaking down horizon of expectations in his novels, which contain more
than “the heat and the mountains and jungle” (Mukherjee 50) of Sri Lanka. And in
some cases, there is no trace of these three things at all. As one of the few Asian
writers to be appealing for the white audience, his emergence should be treated as an
enlargement and enrichment rather than a “disruptive force” to the Canadian literary
tradition.
2
 The whole thrust of his fiction is to break the expectations for a minority writer.
Though there are traces of diaspora in his fiction, he has transcended the confines of
the genre that has been associated with group of negative connotations: forced
displacement, loss, rootlessness. Instead of focusing on the binary opposites of
cultural plurality, Ondaatje’s literary works recognize the potential of cultural plurality.
The confluence of cultures, which is regardless of geographical borders, is germane to
everyone, rather than exclusively to elite or minority communities. Therefore, his
fiction should not be seen as an effort to de-culture the world. On the contrary, it
encourages us to value cultural differences and regard them as opportunities to
embrace rather than problems to be solved.
Transcending the conventional representations of the postcolonial literature,
Ondaatje’s literary camera shifts attention from the consequences of geopolitical
inequalities and regional conflicts to the cosmopolitan experiences of those involved
in transnational interactions. The traditional structure of identity construction of
“center-periphery; same-other; particular-universal” has gone through major changes
under the influence of postmodernism. The process is no longer powered by a
dialectical pattern of opposition, but rather follows a more dynamic, non-linear and
hence less predictable pattern. The interactions with others, be it culturally or
politically, become decisive and transformative agents for the construction of identity.
Ondaatje’s cubist narrative enables him to zoom in on the protagonist’s dynamic
construction of subjectivity.
Ondaatje manages to engage in political discussions through exploring the
everyday life of the working class, where the creative energy is abundant and the
effects of cultural interaction intense, as Anne Enright comments in a book review
that what feeds “this aesthetic vision are the workers; the tunnelers, tanners, loggers,
labourers, all made beautiful by Ondaatje’s highly charged, lyrical prose” (Enright).
Ondaatje’s novels are usually situated in cosmopolitan locations: from the
multicultural Toronto in the 1930s to the war-torn Italian villa during the Second
World War, and then to the Sri Lanka plagued by the Civil War. All these transnational
settings are accompanied by equally cosmopolitan characters: from Macedonian
3
immigrant laborer to Indian soldier in the British army, and then to the Sri Lankan
archaeologist, to name just a few.
He probes into the relation between self and culture contact which is not rare for
cross-cultural literature. What distinguishes Ondaatje in terms of cosmopolitanism is
his underlying ethical project: his commitment to the cultivation of an openness to
difference in a world full of strangers. Another inspirational task Ondaatje attempts to
achieve in his works is to build a cosmopolitan community which encourages
conversations over essential differences and the cultivation of moral responsibility for
the entire human community, including those who are nationally or culturally distant
from us.
In addition, Ondaatje’s unique aesthetics exhibits an empowering potential to
cultivate a keen awareness of differences and an appreciative openness to them.
Jameson argues that one of the most damaging symptoms of the current postmodern
condition is the “waning of affect”, the loss of ability to feel as a subject for another
subject. Ondaatje’s fictions are impregnated with powerful affects as Milena
Marinkova notes that his writing “suggests the intersubjective nature of the affects”
(Zepetnek 3). In his self-reflexive novels, readers are demanded to participate in the
performance of interpersonal interactions, establishing a unique relationship between
the reader and text.
Ondaatje brings a refreshing diversity both thematically and stylistically to the
Canadian literary tradition that has been dominated by white writers, introducing a
much-needed dose of rooted cosmopolitanism in the provincial nationalist mindset.
One reason that motivates this dissertation is Ondaatje’s literary response to the
paradoxical nature of the world, an increasingly interconnected yet still drastically
divided world that is under the threats of climate change and countless conflicts.
Ondaatje’ fiction thematically addresses the complex nature of the cosmos that
concerns the humanity as a whole. Aesthetically, his novels are powerful to cultivate a
cosmopolitan empathy that is essential to the building of a Community of Shared
Future.

4
A Genealogy of Cosmopolitanism

Deep in the Anthropocene, climate change puts all of us at stake. That earth is
resilient to human activity is now being reconsidered given all the catastrophes we
have witnessed in the past few decades. What lies ahead requires an effort from the
entire human beings because the global environmental deterioration has an impact on
every citizen in the world. In addition to the natural threat on a global scale, political
and economic conflicts between adjacent countries in the past two decades have led to
regional unrests that influences the rest of the world, take the refugee crisis in Europe
for instance. Cosmopolitan perspective harbors the potential to go beyond what Beck
calls “methodological nationalism”. It is these situations that fuels the revival of
cosmopolitanism.
More than two hundred years ago, Immanuel Kant observed that “The growing
prevalence of a community among the peoples of the earth has now reached a point at
which the violation of right at any one place on the earth is felt in all places” (Kant
84). The past thirty years have seen a noted increase in both articles and books
addressing cosmopolitanisms in multiple subjects: political philosophy, anthropology,
media studies, etc.
Cosmopolitanism is relatively a new concept in today’s literary discourse. Its
definition and status are still in debate, and there is no consensus on its exact
definition. But this does not mean the concept is impossible to locate. It is fair to say
that cosmopolitanism is an old concept being constantly revived in response to
personal interests and historical circumstances, which explains its complexity and
often disputable status1. Therefore, a thorough reading of the concept’s development

1
The past decade has witnessed an increasing interest in Cosmopolitanism in the Chinese

scholarship. Essays on the concept, in both its normative sense and empirical particulars, are
flourishing. When translated into Chinese, the word “cosmopolitanism” underwent an
“amputation”. Its Chinese name is reduced to World-ism, this could lead to certain
misunderstandings at the first sight.

5
would be both inevitable and essential before we start to interpret Ondaatje’s
cosmopolitan writings.
Etymologically, cosmopolitanism comes from the Greek word kosmopolitês,
which consists of two parts, the first being comos and the other polis. Together, they
mean “citizen of the world.” Most commentators date the concept, as Patell concludes,
“back to Diogenes and the cynics of the fourth century BCE” (Patell 4). It is said that,
when asked where he came from, he was the first to refer to himself as a cosmopolitan.
The connotation of his famous claim is at least two-fold. First, Diogenes rejected the
idea of being defined by “his local origins and group memberships” (Patell 4), all of
which were essential to his Greek contemporaries. He advocated the cultural and
political detachment from one’s place of origin. Second, Diogenes suggested one
should be defined “in terms of more universal aspirations and concerns” (Patell 4),
which explains its vitality and potential.
Both cosmos and polis are key concepts in Greek political philosophy. Cosmos
refers to the “arrangement of the dike (order) of the world” (Douzinas 152). Dike
consists of four major components: “the physis (nature) of all beings, the ethos of
social mores, the nomos of customs and laws and, most importantly, the logos or
rational foundation of all that exists” (Douzinas 152). The Greek cosmos is thus a
harmonious universe in order, with a well-preserved hierarchy according to which
things are placed. While on the other hand, polis, or the city-state, providing its
citizens the order and harmony to achieve their aims, in the company of others.
However, Zeno, arguably the inventor of cosmopolitanism, was against the idea
of conventions of the city, including major claims like customs, religion and law.
What Zeno and his supporters advocated was to transcend “the tawdry demi-monde of
the many parochial cities with their ethnic divisions and prejudices, wars, slavery,
traditional families and conventional private property” (Douzinas 153). And it was
with this kind of rootless mindset that Diogenes described himself as “homeless,
without a country, poor, a wanderer” (Douzinas 154). The Stoics believed that only

6
the cosmopolis can enable its citizens to have the right access to wisdom and virtue.
The confinements of the earthly polis were inevitable because it was not governed by
justice and law. With little involvement of the notion “power”, their scorn of the
earthly polis and promotion of a heavenly cosmos is an early version of a rootless
cosmopolitanism.
Their Roman successors transformed the Greek philosophy, a moral universalism,
into an imperial strategy for world power. Cicero, who started the transformation,
recognized that Greek cosmopolitanism was of great use to restrain the local and
ethnic influences on individuals. Roman politicians applied this philosophy in the
building of their empire. Therefore, the secularizing process of the concept soon
happened. Marcus Aurelius took the divine out of the Greek cosmopolitanism:
If the intellectual capacity is common to all, common too is the reason, which
makes us rational beings. If so, we share reason which tells us what ought and
ought not to happen in common. If so, the law is common. If so, we are
citizens. If so, we are fellow-members of a republic. If so, the cosmos is like a
city – for in what other single polity can the whole human race belong in
common? (Douzinas 158)
Cosmopolitanism has been criticized for the role it played in colonization, which
has rightfully drawn criticism and concerns among scholars. But its evolvement from
the Greek cosmopolitanism is revised in the Enlightenment.
In the eighteenth century, with the rise of nation-state in Europe, the relationship
between the world and the local became once again a dominant political topic. The
French revolution and its American counterpart made powerful claims declaring that
rights belonged to all humanity. Cosmopolitanism was thus revived as an alternative
to nationalism, which is believed to hold the potential to establish a global civil
society that can transcend national boundaries and evade conflicts. Germany, as one
of the greatest philosophical nations, gave the concept its most powerful revival. And
among many commentators, Immanuel Kant composed some of the most influential
essays regarding this concept.
In Kant’s discourse, cosmopolitanism was initially described as a philosophical
project designed “to work out a universal history of the world in accordance with a
plan of nature aimed at a perfect civil union of mankind.” (Patell 5) Kant transformed
7
his theoretical construction of this concept with time. In his later essay, Perpetual
Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795), Kant suggested that peace can only be
achieved by forming a pacific federation. “This federation would be distinct from a
peace treaty in that it seeks to end not merely one war, as does the latter, but rather to
end all wars forever” (Kant 80).
What Kant proposed was “binding international law and cosmopolitan law”
(Douzinas 160). The aim is to create a league of nations without a constitution. All
states of the league, or pacific federation, would be voluntary members. It is not an
obligation for any state to remain in the league when it finds itself in a situation that is
against its interest. Kant believed that this league could exist in a peaceful way
because it would be established voluntarily.
Kant offered two main concepts that are most at home in this dissertation:
cosmopolitan right and hospitality. While the Stoics advocated that, to lead a good life
we should learn to cultivate an apathy towards things or people near us, what the
Enlightenment philosophy proposed was largely in contrast with that of the Stoics: the
cultivation of empathy. Empathy was translated from the German Einfühlung,
meaning “feeling into”. Empathy can be understood as an ability to recognize and
share the emotions of another being.
Given that Kant’s legal project stands little chance in the current political climate,
contemporary scholars have transformed the singular cosmopolitanism to a plural
concept after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Bruce and Horta argue that there has been a shift from a singular
cosmopolitanism, which is seen as “an overriding loyalty to and concern with the
welfare of humanity as a whole”, to a plural cosmopolitanism, which now becomes
“the business of social sciences like anthropology, sociology, and history rather than a
topic reserved for political theory and moral philosophy” (Robbins and Horta 1). In
essence, this shift marks an intrusion of political cosmopolitanism in other academic
disciplines. In their words, this “unhealthily skinny ethical abstraction” blossoms into
a “fleshed-out particulars” (Robbins and Horta 1). But the rejuvenated and now
vibrant term opens up many questions and doubts that need to be clarified before any
8
celebration. Although the seemingly chronological transition suggests progress and
evolution, the transition is in fact more complicated than the assumption promises.
There is no doubt that the ancient cosmopolitanism asserts a detachment from
one’s place of origin. That is to say no matter how much emphasis we put on the
merits of ancient cosmopolitanism, we have to admit that it indeed “creates a habitual
detachment from the values of the locality” (Robbins and Horta 3), which could be
and have been used to homogenize other cultures and peoples by imperialists. With
the rise of nation-state, this logic can hardly take into effect.
Bruce defines the revised version of cosmopolitanism, or “new
cosmopolitanism”, as “any one of many possible modes of life, thought, and
sensibility that are produced when commitments and loyalties are multiple and
overlapping, no one of them necessarily trumping the others” (Robbins and Horta 2).
The direction that new cosmopolitan theory is heading towards is a rooted
cosmopolitanism. It helps us approach differences as opportunities, while addressing
the importance of keeping cultural roots, which largely define who we are.
Cosmopolitan project of any kind is not about breaking borders, be it cultural, or
political. Rather, its mission is to cultivate an openness to differences, and encourage
positive conversation to break the boundaries caused by these differences.
Many scholars have provided their definitions of cosmopolitanism. Patell defines
cosmopolitanism as “a perspective that regards human difference as an opportunity
rather than a problem to be solved” (Patell 4). Though short, Patell’s definition serves
as a positive starting point. Ulf Hannerz defines cosmopolitanism as “an intellectual
and aesthetic stance of openness toward divergent cultural experiences, a search for
contrasts rather than uniformity” (Hannerz 239), which implies a “willingness to
become involved with the Other”. Thomas Bender’s definition of cosmopolitanism is
“an unsettling experience that provokes inquiry into difference. its demand is not only
to come to an understanding of the other, but also to come to a new understanding of
oneself” (Robbins and Horta 12).
Based on the selection of definitions, we can agree although their contours “are
not always well defined and it is traversed internally by all kinds of fault lines” (Fine
9
1), there has been a consensus on a number of shared commitments, as Robert Line
thus lists:
(a) the overcoming of national presuppositions and prejudices within the
social scientific disciplines themselves and the reconstruction in this light of
the core concepts we employ; (b) the recognition that humanity has entered an
era of mutual interdependence on a world scale and the conviction that this
worldly existence is not adequately understood within the terms of
conventional social science; (c) the development of normative and frankly
prescriptive theories of world citizenship, global justice and cosmopolitan
democracy. (Fine 2)
As a novelist, Ondaatje has been active and innovative in practicing and
exploring the concept of cosmopolitanism in his fiction writing. Therefore, this
dissertation defines cosmopolitanism as a structure of thoughts that contains the
following propositions:
(a). a psychological self that is open to cultural others and willing to engage in
conversation with them and transform one’s perspective and sense of the self;
(b). an ethical stance which encourages us to show hospitality to strangers and
willingness to shoulder moral obligations to them.

A Critical Review of Ondaatje Studies

Ondaatje began to publish in the 1960s, but his reputation was confined to a
relatively small academic circle. It was the success of In the Skin of a Lion and The
English Patient that brought him popularity among readers around the world and
generated increasing critical interest in his cubist narrative and ethical concern.
The majority of the English scholarship has unsurprisingly focused on The
English Patient, given that it is the Booker prize winner. The Chinese scholarship has
shown an even stronger preference to this novel, which I will come back to in the
second part of the review. The English scholarship on Ondaatje shows his three
overriding preoccupations: the cubist narrative aesthetics in the postmodernist context,
the problematic identity and trauma of Diaspora and the marginal; the blending of
truth and fiction in history.
10
 The articles and critical works published on Ondaatje in the English academia are
too numerous to be all surveyed here. Therefore, I have selected authors whose
themes and preoccupations are relevant with my critical perspective on these issues,
excluding certain overlapping articles in the following review.
A large body of interviews and introductory material of Ondaatje offer a kind of
autobiographical insight into his literary creation and his life as well, with the latter
influencing and even shaping his works. Eva-Marie Kröller in The Cambridge
Companion to Canadian Literature (2004) briefs Ondaatje’s writing career, revealing
that he “begins his writing career as a poet, then becomes a novelist” (149), which
explains the poetic calling in his novels. Faye Hammill in Canadian Literature (2007)
argues that Michael Ondaatje “rivals Margaret Atwood in international fame” (159).
This recognition properly gives Ondaatje the credit that he truly deserves as one of the
best Canadian writers. In an interview, Ondaatje has confessed to Catherine Bush that
he is “drawn to a form that can have a … cubist or mural voice to capture the
variousness of things” (qtd. in James 70), from which we can see that Ondaatje’s
trademark narrative has come into being in his second novel. A large body of articles
have examined Ondaatje’s cubist narrative, which shows how much Ondaatje has
expanded postmodernist narrative. This is partly why I have not included his first
novel in the dissertation, for Ondaatje did not start his cubist experiment until In the
Skin of a Lion.
Joan M. Brockmann has dedicated her doctoral dissertation, Michael Ondaatje’s
Moments of Fiction (2002), to studying the narrative of his novels. She compares
Ondaatje’s techniques of storytelling with a box of photographs and points out the
effect as “a full, rich, multi-layered, multi-perspective story centered on the images
that surface” (4). Brockmann’s contribution to the discussion of Cubism is that she
sees it as a response to the stimulus of imperialism, recognizing Ondaatje’s political
engagement in his highly poetic prose.
As aforementioned, identity is one of the key preoccupations of Ondaatje’s study.
Chitra Krishnan in her monograph, Exploring Identity in the Novels of Michael
Ondaatje (2014), has fully examined identity in Ondaatje’s novels in the context of
11
diaspora literature. Her book presents some of the major theories of diaspora literature,
“namely migration, displacement, expatriate, immigrant, exile, nostalgia, longing,
memory, past…” (3) The list goes on. It is fair to say that Krishnan has composed a
thorough study of the theme she sets out to expound. But as she confesses that she has
made “every effort… to avoid repetition” (4), her study seems to lack a structured
direction.
Certain critics have recognized Ondaatje’s consistent representations of bodily
experience and its healing throughout his career. In Haptic Aesthetics and
Micropolitical Writing (2011), Milena Marinkova’s research puts emphasis on the
representations of bodily experience and emotions in Ondaatje’s collected works and
readers’ affective engagement. Marinkova notes such an aesthetic “forges an
intimately embodied and ethically responsible relationship among audience, author,
and text” (4). Marinkova creatively appropriates a term from cinematic criticism,
“haptic”, to explore Ondaatje’s emphasis on touch and cinematic narrative which
blurs the boundaries between the reader and the characters, enhancing the
connectivity and empathy. Marinkova’s interdisciplinary book offers an innovative
approach that sheds light on finding new ways to approach postmodernist fictions.
Her keen observation of the powerful affective interactions between Ondaatje’s novels
and the audience mirrors and supports my study of reading as a cosmopolitan practice,
which is explored in The English Patient.
Under the influence of the flourishing cultural studies since late 20th century,
certain scholars have studied Ondaatje’s novels in relation to cultural studies. The
volume, Comparative Cultural Studies and Michael Ondaatje’s Writing (2005), edited
by Steven Tötösy de Zepetneke, argues that Michael Ondaatje’s fiction “represents in
many ways the best of contemporary Canadian literature in English not only in the
context of Canada itself but also on the international scene” (1). His remark echoes
my argument of Ondaatje being one of the spokesmen for cosmopolitan writers. This
volume offers a wide range of interdisciplinary studies where textual analysis is
merged with carefully selected tenets of the field of cultural studies, including
religion, art, linguistics and media, etc. All these exciting tenets explain why
12
“Ondaatje’s texts raise much interest among readers of fiction as well as in
scholarship” (1).
A small portion of scholars have included Ondaatje’s poems in their study.
Annick Hillger is one of them. In Not Needing All the Words (2006), she examines
Ondaatje’s texts against modernity’s quest for identity within philosophical ideas.
Susan Sontag’s Aesthetics of Silence provides a context that influences Hillger’s
perception of Ondaatje’s poetic as a pre-local mode of knowledge which transcends
the confines of the logocentric tradition. Her argument of associating the concept of
self with the poetic is relevant to my study of cosmopolitan self.
Aaron Mauro in her M.A. thesis, International Bastards: Mourning Literary
Nationalism in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient
(2007), has fully examined Ondaatje’s two interlinked novels, In the Skin of a Lion
and The English Patient, in terms of their intertextual structure. She notes that
Ondaatje’s novels enmesh texts, cultures, loves intertextually with the political,
turning intertextuality “a program for living internationally” (2). Mauro highlights the
heterogeneous nature of Canadian literature, which powerfully supports my defense
for Ondaatje. In Post-National Arguments: The Politics of the Anglophone-Canadian
Novel Since 1967 (1993), Frank Davey criticizes that In the Skin of a Lion does not
“inhabit any social geography that can be called ‘Canada’” (259). He furthers his
argument: “post-national space, in which sites are as interchangeable as postcards, in
which discourses are transnational and in which political issues are constructed on
non-national (and often ahistorical) ideological grounds” (259). Mauro’s fine
observation sheds light on Davey’s failure to understand the plural nature of Canadian
social context.
A few dissertations written in the new millennium have keenly pointed out
Ondaatje’s ethical concern as a response to the globalizing yet still turbulent political
climate of the era. In Worldwise: Global Change and Ethical Demands in the
Cosmopolitan Fictions of Kazuo Inshiguro, Jamaica Kincaid, J.M. Coetzee, and
Michael Ondaatje (2003), Katherine Ann Stanton selects in her doctoral dissertation a
cast of renown and hyphened English writers, including Ondaatje. She argues their
13
texts “expand the ethical domain beyond the shifting borders of the nation, beyond the
immediate, the close and the easily loved” (Stanton 5). She reads Anil’s Ghost against
John McClure’s post-secular claims, suggesting that the novel “effects a
transformation… on the incomplete or unfinished universality of the law” (8). The
necessity of a universal framework for criminal justice that she proposes is reflection
of cosmopolitan concern for humanity as a whole. But she has not clarified whose
definition and standards should be employed in the discussion. Without a proper
negotiation between diverse understandings, a totalizing framework, as the fictional
character Sarath worries, could deteriorate the already turbulent status quo.
Echoing Stanton’s categorization of writers, in Caryl Phillips, J.M. Coetzee, and
Michael Ondaatje: Writing at the Intersection of the Postmodern and Postcolonial
(2000), Renee T. Schatteman also examines Ondaatje with another two writers who
share Ondaatje’s post-colonial origin. Schatteman argues that they have explored “the
ambivalences engendered by colonialism rather than conforming to a one-dimensional
understanding of postcolonial literature” (ⅷ). This observation shows that Ondaatje
has expanded his response from the postcolonial to a larger context. But Schatteman’s
further argument fails to identify what this larger context is, which limits his
perspective and depth reading Ondaatje’s cosmopolitan writing. Therefore, his
interpretation is less politically charged that Ondaatje’s texts actually are.
Julie Mcgonegal’s monograph, Imagining Justice: The Politics of Postcolonial
Forgiveness and Reconciliation (2009) argues that to address the violence, racism,
sexism inherent in postcolonial economic dispossession we have to value
reconciliatory efforts in the discussion. Mcgonegal acknowledges the great difficulty
creating an empathic social context in which forgiveness can exist. My study of Anil’s
Ghost overlaps with her emphasis on the cultivation of empathy. She highlights the
constructive role fiction can play in such reconciliation projects given that literary
imagination allows us to revisit history and thus understand the nature of conflicts.
As seen in the above reviews, postcolonial studies, postmodernism,
intertextuality are among the most prominent theoretical frameworks that are used to
explore Ondaatje’s fiction, accompanied by other approaches and research interests.
14
There is a large body of articles on Ondaatje’s novels using the above-mentioned
avenues of interpretation. The review here will only mention the study that is relevant
to the issue of cosmopolitanism.
In Echoes of the Past: Nomad Memory in Michael Ondaatje's The English
Patient (2007), Mirja Lobnik draws a parallel between the image of desert and the
notion of memory, two major themes in The English Patient, pointing out that they are
both “fluid, malleable, and always in motion” (72). He argues that the elusive concept
of memory is not merely a theme, rather, it is “a main narrative device as well” (73).
This observation partially accounts for the highly fragmented narrative of the novel.
By expounding the relationship between memory and history, Lobnik concludes that
the novel “closely attends to voices silenced and unheard” (103), a consistent focus of
Ondaatje’s fiction, which echoes Anne Enright’s comment.
In The Racialized Aesthetics of Liberation in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a
Lion (2006), Jodi Lundgren focuses on the racial aesthetics presented in In the Skin of
a Lion. She has brought to the table a controversial piece. In a CBC Radio’s annual
Canada Reads program, Steven Page claimed that the novel is a “beautiful book about
immigrant experience” (15). Lundgren criticizes Page for not being able to recognize
the suffering of the workers. This dissertation has also explored to the paradoxical
imagery of a tannery, echoing Lundgren’s and Ondaatje’s own critique of the racism
in the multicultural Canadian society. Terry Eagleton defines aesthetics as “a vision of
human energies as radical ends in themselves which is the implacable enemy of all
dominative or instrumentalist thought” (Eagleton 9). In his particular powerful
aesthetics, Ondaatje perceives “an opportunity to redress this historical imbalance”
(17). Lundgren’s argument supports mine as I explore the culture contact of the poor
and from below in the same novel.
In The Nation as “International Bastard”: Ethnicity and Language in Michael
Ondaatje’s The English Patient (2003), Shannon Smyrl notes that “Ondaatje’s
narrative as a whole contains a trick that parallels Kip’s unsuspicious consumption of
Western culture” (36). She recognizes the limitations of an identity based on the
conditions of cultural exclusion. At the end of her article, she points out that this leads
15
to Kip’s retreat from the West in search of “a more productive understanding of
identity” (36). My contribution to the discussion is that I have filled the blank Smyrl
leaves in her essay by offering a possible model for the new identity in the
dissertation.
Several articles are dedicated to analyze the trauma in Ondaatje’s post-colonial
narrative, although there is a mixed perception of this issue. Some critics are angered
by Ondaatje’s thematic preferences. To be precise, there are a few book reviews and
articles accusing Ondaatje of not confronting the traumas of the Sri Lankan civil war,
especially when Anil’s Ghost was published. Tom LeClair has criticized Anil’ Ghost in
The Sri Lankan Patients (2009) as “irresponsible” (31) for its lack of political
engagement. Margaret Scanlan in Anil’s Ghost and Terrorism’s Time (2004) echoes his
concern questioning that Ondaatje omits “so much of what we expect from a political
novel in the way of public events and historical detail, Ondaatje might risk
aestheticizing terror, repeating the modernist gesture of turning away from atrocity to
timeless form” (302). In Diasporic Cross-Currents in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost
and Anita Rau Badami’s The Hero’s Walk (2003), Heike Härting has also made similar
comments on the seemingly “ahistorical terms” (44).
However, Victoria Burrows’ The Heterotopic Spaces of Postcolonial Trauma in
Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2008) defends Ondaatje’s unique way of political
response, suggesting the Ondaatje’s habit of detour is “well ingrained in the
ethnocentric blindness of trauma theory itself” (162). This resonates with my
perception of Ondaatje’s indirect way of political engagement. The dissertation has
expounded Ondaatje’s nuanced representation of the political on the personal level in
the dissertation, especially in the second and third chapters. In Gesturing Towards the
Local: Intimate Histories in Anil’s Ghost (2005), David Farrier analyzes the binary of
intimacy and distance in the novel and argues that Anil’s “nomadism is not the
impediment to engaging with the local” (85). Farrier’s argument resonates with mine
that nomadism is characteristic of the globalizing world, which actually increases
confluence of cultures between the local. Tuire Valkeakari is among the first scholars
to recognize Ondaatje’s literary response to the cosmopolitan context of the world. In
16
his A Journey to “Partial Cosmopolitanism” in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost
(2013), he places the novel in dialogue with Kwame Anthony’s vision of partial
cosmopolitanism. I have used rooted cosmopolitanism in the dissertation, which is of
similar connotation. Valkeakari manages to address “citizenship as a mode of
belonging and giving a name and definition to one specific type of transnational
identity” (68).
Ondaatje’s last novel The Cat’s Table has not yet received enough attention from
scholars. This is partly because the novel is more of a collection of loosely connected
vignettes. Alaa Alghamdi is one of the earliest critics to have studied the novel. His
Navigating Transition: Freedom, Limitation and the Post-Colonial Persona in
Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table (2012) points out that the melding of the marginal
personas at the cat’s table on the ship is “a true kaleidoscope” (1) and “may indeed be
the place to look if one hopes to capture diversity” (1). I have in my first chapter made
a similar argument that culture contact from below is most active and powerful.
Alghamdi also studies the liminal subject of the novel, which Charli-Ann Punt has
fully examined in Stories of Liminal Voyage in the Indian Ocean: Michael Ondaatje’s
The Cat’s Table & Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea (2014). Punt reads places the
novel in the context of Indian Ocean, adding regional particularity to the discussion.
The contribution is a cosmopolitan practice as it enhances the role the local plays in
connecting the global. Punt strictly reads the novel against Arnold Van Gennep’s
anthropological concept of a rite of passage, echoing Alghamdi’s analysis of the
liminal subject. Punt’s study resonates with mine given that we have both recognized
the importance of the concept in understanding the novel. But I do not rely on the
concept as much as Punt does, as I read the novel as a Bildungsroman. Therefore, the
concept is used more as a supporting role in this dissertation.
Laura Savu Walker in Rites of Passage: Moving Hearts and Transforming
Memories in Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table (2014) argues that the novel can be
seen as a continuation of Ondaatje’s memoir, Running in the family (1982), as it is
narrated from the perspective of a Sri Lankan adolescent. Walker examines the
interplay between two modes of memorial expression, automatic and reflective. By
17
doing so she unravels the implications memory carries for the narrator’s
self-perception both in the past and at present. Her research helps us better understand
the narrative dynamics of the novel. In Third Culture Time and Place: Michael
Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table (2016), Antje M. Rauwerda reads the novel against David
Pollock’s definition of Third Culture Kid, analyzing the narrator’s transnational
identity. While Rauwerda recognizes cultural hybridization as a feature of TCK
identity, I have replaced TCK in the dissertation with cosmopolitan patriot, given that
the post-colonial categorization falls short of fully comprehending Ondaatje’s larger
landscape of identity and subjectivity.
Compared with the diverse and vibrant research abroad, the domestic studies of
Michael Ondaatje and his novels have lagged behind in terms of the number of
publication and thematic range. It was not until the new Millennium that Chinese
scholars started recognizing Ondaatje. The data on CNKI shows that there are around
54 (2018) articles and 20 M.A. theses, with the majority centered around The English
Patient, calling forth discussions of postmodernist writing, new historicism,
post-colonial studies of identity and trauma, etc. The positive message is that the data
has shown since 2007, Ondaatje’s study has been picking up speed as the Chinese
scholarship gradually recognizes his importance and value.
By far Liu Dan is the only Chinese scholar to have written a doctoral dissertation
on Ondaatje’s works. Her dissertation, Critique of Post-Colonialism and Construction
of Subjectivity in the Context of Diaspora: A Study of Michael Ondaatje’s Novels
(2010) presents a thorough exploration of the subjective construction from the
perspectives of post-colonialism and the literature of Diaspora. The dissertation has
systematically studied Ondaatje’s works, which greatly helps us understand
Ondaatje’s vision and thought as a post-colonial writer. Her pioneering endeavor is
motivational and inspirational for Ondaatje study in China. Zhang Zhi has been a
major force in promoting Ondaatje’s novels with several book reviews introducing
Ondaatje’s novels; he has studied In the Skin of a Lion in the Context of New
Historicism (2008), which explores the complicacy between the text and history in the
novel. Wu Bei has voiced a concern in her article that rootless writers like Ondaatje is
18
troubled by the problem of solidarity, therefore he expects to write novels that does
not focus on nation-state and transcends cultural roots. I argue that though her concern
is worth our attention, her accusation of Ondaatje’s attitude towards cultural roots
needs to be reconsidered. In my third chapter, I have provided a thorough explanation.
Wu Shanshan interprets The English Patient against Linda Hutcheon’s
Postmodern Poetics (2017), arguing that the use of parody in the novel illustrates
Hutcheon’s theory. Ondaatje’s other novels have also drawn attention from Chinese
scholarship. Guo Guoliang and Wu Bei have examined Ondaatje’s innovative
experiment with language and narrative in Divisadero (2007). I want to mention Lu
Hui’s consistent interest in Ondaatje as she has published a handful articles, reading
the writing of history in Ondaatje’ novels.
It can be concluded from the review that Ondaatje’s fiction has not yet received
enough critical attention that it deserves. A few studies have noticed Ondaatje’s
concern for nationalism and identity. But they have not transcended the binary
opposites of post-colonial studies that Ondaatje has been attempting to break in his
literary imagination. Meanwhile, the existing criticism on Ondaatje’s postmodernist
writing and historiography, directed mainly at The English Patient, is further confined
to a narrowly circumscribed stud?.y of approaches.
Several attempts are made in this dissertation. First and foremost, the dissertation
offers new material for the study of Ondaatje’s fiction with a systematical study of
four of his six novels. It grasps Ondaatje’s genuine concern for the humanity as a
whole in the interconnected yet still violently divided world. Through the
philosophical perspective of cosmopolitanism, the dissertation offers a fresh and
profound insight in connecting Ondaatje’s unique postmodernist narrative and his
“detour” political engagement. Drawing upon previous related colonial studies, the
dissertation decolonizes Ondaatje’s texts and thus transcends the binary opposites in
post-colonial discourse, which gives a boost to the cosmopolitan conversation of
embracing differences and bridging gaps, a virtue the world desperately needs. The
dissertation has also innovatively linked reading and the cultivation of empathy,

19
rendering reading itself as cosmopolitan practice. The dissertation sheds light on the
positive and powerful role reading and literary criticism can play in building a
Community of Shared Future. It is my hope that there will be follow-up studies on
Ondaatje’s works and cosmopolitanism in other literary texts.

The Argument and Organization of the Dissertation

In the age of globalization, the world has become increasingly connected yet still
divided. Due to its elaboration on cultural roots, difference, empathy and hospitality,
cosmopolitanism, an ancient and complicated concept, has been largely discussed and
inevitably drawn much criticism. Michael Ondaatje (1943-) is one of the most
renowned Canadian novelists. The Canadian multicultural society and his nomadic
experience as a diaspora breeds a new structure of thoughts in his novels which
transcends the binary opposites of post-colonial literature. The two core issues of
cosmopolitanism: that difference should be regarded as an opportunity rather than a
problem to be solved and the cultivation of empathy, finds a powerful representation
in his novels.
This dissertation explores the cosmopolitan subjects represented in Ondaatje’s
four novels—In the Skin of a Lion, The English Patient, Anil’s Ghost and The Cat’s
Table. Drawing upon important concepts in cosmopolitan theories, such as difference,
empathy, and postcolonial theories and postmodern aesthetics, this dissertation
examines Ondaatje’s cosmopolitan writing, sketching his navigational route: the
cosmopolitan self, rootless cosmopolitanism and rooted cosmopolitanism.
Apart from the introduction and the conclusion, this dissertation consists of four
chapters. The introduction offers a general review of commentaries on Ondaatje’s
fiction and life, and a critical literature review both at home and abroad, giving
readers a clear insight into Ondaatje’s fiction. In addition, the dissertation provides a
genealogy of cosmopolitanism, which establishes the basic theoretical framework of
this study.
Chapter One studies the construction of the cosmopolitan self in In the Skin of a

20
Lion, engaging in the discussion of cosmopolitanism from below. By reconstructing
Toronto in the course of being industrialized, Ondaatje critiques the racism and social
imbalance in the multicultural society. Ondaatje reflects upon the need for an
alternative structure of thoughts towards difference in the age when transnational and
cross-cultural interactions have become a norm. The protagonist’s inability to talk and
desire for conversation provides the momentum for him to be placed in otherness,
enabling him to reconceive the self and the other. The intertextuality between this
novel and The Epic of Gilgamesh embodies Ondaatje’s primitive model of
cosmopolitanism: that difference should be regarded as an opportunity rather than a
problem to be solved.
Chapter Two focuses on the four traumatized characters in the Second World War
and examines nationalism and rootless cosmopolitanism. Different from Anderson’s
nation-state community, which is based on a shared past, the community in the novel
is formed to help the members to get through the difficult present and strive for a
shared future. Ondaatje innovatively employs reading as a way of building the
community. Reading novels is itself a cosmopolitan practice. In The English Patient,
Ondaatje uses the fluid concept of memory as a narrative structure to deconstruct the
relationship between nation-state and human conflicts. Though Ondaatje proposes the
deceptive rootless cosmopolitan, or “international bastard”, he questions its potential
to quench the flames of violence. The second half of the novel criticizes the concept’s
proposition of detachment from one’s cultural roots, which lays groundwork for the
concept of rooted cosmopolitan in Anil’s Ghost.
Chapter Three reads Ondaatje’ most controversial novel Anil’s Ghost and shows
how Ondaatje broadens his conceptualization of difference to the realm of gender. At
the cost of incest, Anil rejects the expected identity for women in the patriarchal
society. In response to the criticism that Anil’s Ghost is “apolitical”, the study points
out the habit of detour of Ondaatje’s political writing. The novel constructs a space to
reflect upon the origins of ethnical conflict in Sri Lanka and most importantly starts
the healing process on the individual level. Through the creation of Anil, a
reverse-diaspora, Ondaatje unravels the construction of identity, which invites
21
interrogation and conversation on difference. The Sri Lankan anthropologist Sarath’s
acceptance of Anil in the end reveals Ondaatje’s vision of cosmopolitan as one who is
able to keep their cultural roots and embrace hybridity at the same time.
Chapter Four analyzes Ondaatje’s heavily autobiographical novel, The Cat’s
Table, as a cosmopolitan Bildungsroman in its consideration of how Ondaatje uses the
innocence of the adolescent narrator Michael as a trope to dramatize the construction
of the cosmopolitan self. Reading against Arnaold Van Gennep’s concept “a rite of
passage”, the chapter traces Michael’s construction of self while interacting with
strangers during the three-week sea voyage. Ondaatje boldly launches his
cosmopolitan project in a genre that has been associated with the cultivation of
nationalism. Therefore it is undoubtedly a dramatization of his proposition of
embracing difference as an opportunity and the importance of cultivating empathy.
The conclusion briefly summarizes the main points of the dissertation. Pointing
out Ondaatje’s transcendence of binary opposites of post-colonial literature, this part
generalizes the development of cosmopolitan thinking in his literary imagination.
In short, this dissertation attempts to position Ondaatje’s fiction in the context of
globally flourishing study of cosmopolitanism and the recognition of a Community of
Shared Future, with the expectation to offer a Chinese perspective to engage in the
global discussion of the concept. The transformation from singular to hybridity is true
to the development of the concept as well. That Ondaatje’s fiction emphasizes on the
cultivation of empathy through reading sheds light on the positive role that reading
and literary criticism can play in the building of a Community of Shared Future.

22
Chapter One The Cosmopolitan Self in In the Skin of a Lion

Published in 1987, In the Skin of a Lion can be seen as the manifesto of

Ondaatje’s cubist fiction. Ondaatje claims that he is “drawn to a form that can have
a…cubist or mural voice to capture the variousness of things” (qtd. in James 70). The
experiment of cubism in literary writing finds its initial voice in John Berger’s works.
The novel is noted for its unique fragmented and nonlinear narrative, which partly
explains why it is categorized as postmodern fiction. But “postmodern” can be
oversimplifying given that postmodern narratives vary from writer to writer. For
instance, Ondaatje’s fragmented narrative differs from Julian Barnes’s collage of
loosely connected stories in A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. The novel
mainly centers around Patrick, though there are a few shifts of perspectives: the
second chapter switches from Patrick’s childhood in a remote village to Temelcoff
working at the bridge in Toronto; the sixth chapter switches from Patrick’s revenge to
his cellmate Caravaggio’s prison break. The novel can also be categorized as a
historiography as it blurs the line between fiction and fact with historical figures in its
literary imagination. There is already discussion of the role that actual historical
events and characters play in the novel. Mala Devi argues that “Ondaatje’s use of
actual historical events, places and people gives credence to these voices and their
stories, inviting empathy and understanding” (Devi 137).
With an intricately woven cast of characters of different cultures, Ondaatje
creates an imaginary social milieu where we can magnify the subtle yet powerful
culture contact between individuals that transcends geographical and ideological
boundaries. The novel tells of stories of Patrick Lewis’s job as a searcher and his
romantic relationship with Clara and Alice; Nicolas Temelcoff’s escape from the civil
war; and Caravaggio’s adventures as a thief, etc.
Migration is a predominant theme of the novel. The novel portrays a cluster of
immigrant workers in Toronto in the 1930s. Canada is among the first countries to
enact the policy of multiculturalism as a national law in the 1970s. People from all

23
over the world have been migrating to Canada over the course of two centuries,
creating an active global environment of cultural diversity within this active nation.
Among the immigrants many are writers and Ondaatje is one of them. Contrary to
many other immigrant writers, Ondaatje does not draw directly from his personal
experience to create a Sri Lankan character in this early novel. Instead, his characters
are of various national backgrounds. The spatial and temporal shifts of narrative allow
readers to navigate from one place to another and one time period to another. At the
same time, the novel addresses culture contact from below, as it gives voice to “the
poor, the weak, the minorities and the cultural marginal” (Vertovec and Cohen 14).
Ondaatje takes its title from The Gilgamesh Epic. “The joyful will stoop with sorrow,
and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will
wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion” (SL Epigraph). There is a
metaphorical comparison between moral responsibility and the skin of a lion, which
exemplifies that cosmopolitanism concerns the all walks of life instead of just being a
preoccupation of the elite. Evoking the experience of migrants, Ondaatje expounds
cosmopolitanism as an alternative to multiculturalism in terms of their distinct
attitudes towards difference.

1.1 The Cosmopolitan Self

In a world that is characteristic of transnational human interaction, whether

imposed or voluntary, societies are becoming “increasingly multiple in their nature”
(Hall 2002: 25). It is essential for us to learn to navigate through difference and
otherness given that nowadays nearly any fixed geographical space can be a milieu of
transnational interaction.
Hall argues that the cosmopolitan self is the only kind of self that is adequate to
the current cosmopolitan environment:
We need attachments but each person can have a variety, a multiplicity of

24
 these at their command. They need to stand outside them, to reflect on them

and to dispense with them when they are no longer necessary. And this is a

view of “the cosmopolitan self” (Hall 2002: 27).

The main character Patrick is one such being whose identity remains uncertain
when first introduced to readers. By creating a relatively root-less character, Ondaatje
expounds the essential ambivalence regarding the formation of self in terms of
cultural roots and differences. Patrick constructs his identity as he interacts with
people of difference, both cultural and ideological. Hired as a searcher in Toronto in
his adulthood, he embarks upon a journey that transforms him entirely.
Psychologically, Patrick’s self is a cosmopolitan self because he sees differences as
opportunities to rather than problems. And more importantly he would eventually
shoulder moral obligations to others. George argues that when we look closer at the
self that Patrick has formed interacting with people of different cultures and social
status, we see a self that has “relinquished its solidity, identity and substantiality, we
may conceive the self at any given point in time as a ‘hybrid’” (George 76).
The formation of the self involves a selective process of “excluding or absorbing
all the differences… the multitude of different regions, peoples, classes, genders”
(Hall 1997: 22). What distinguishes a cosmopolitan self is that it engages in
conversations to confront potential conflicts caused by these differences. It is most
vibrant in situations like mass immigration when various cultures enter the same
social milieu with little time for people to adapt to the cultural plurality. Another
problem with mass immigration for the native is how to manage to the relationship
between the local and the global, particularly in regards to the new dialectics of
identity. Etymologically we know the concept of cosmopolitanism consists of two
parts: cosmos and polis. In the ancient Greek discourse, emphasis is put on the
cosmos. Therefore, we can interpret cosmopolitanism as a structure of thoughts that
deal with the relationship between the cosmos and the polis. Cosmopolitanism is also
about how to find a balance between the local and the global. “Global and local are
the two faces of the same movement from one epoch of globalization, the one which
has been dominated by the nation-state, the national economies, the national cultural
25
identities, to somethings new” (Hall 1997: 27).
As a native Canadian, Patrick Lewis is strangely separated from the mainstream
culture and ideology. This arrangement is an attempt to break the horizon of
expectations. The concept was coined by the literary theorist Hans Robert Jauss in
1969 in his Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory. Jauss argues that “The
new text evokes for the reader the horizon of expectations and rules familiar from
earlier texts, which are then varied, corrected, altered, or even just reproduced” (Jauss
23). In other words, when we leaf through a new text, we read it with preconceived
expectations about the characters and the plot. These expectations are planted in
advance in accordance to our own cultural, aesthetic and ideological backgrounds.
Patrick’s relatively unconventional and mysterious personal history serves to break
the link between readers and their conventional cognitive patterns. This kind of
reading is beneficial for readers to involve with difference and otherness, laying
groundwork for potential conversations over these issues.
We are uncertain about Patrick’s identity, given that little has been said about his
background. To begin with, he and his father abruptly enter the story in the middle of
nowhere. His hometown “did not appear on a map until 1910, though his family had
worked there for twenty years and the land had been homesteaded since 1816” (SL
10). In addition, the “pale green and nameless” (SL 11) Bellrock disappoints our
attempt to locate the youngster’s exact whereabouts. The absence of young Patrick’s
mother is obvious. However, this is not even addressed once in the novel. In fact,
there is barely any female character around in his childhood. On the other hand, his
father Hazen Lewis, is an “abashed man, withdrawn from the world… uninterested in
the habits of civilization” (SL 15). Seldom do the father and son communicate with
each other. They would only talk to each other when they have to. In the first chapter,
which centers around Patrick’s childhood, the only occasion when the father and son
vocally communicate is when they work together to save a cow in a frozen river: “I’m
going under now. You’ve got to get it fast” (SL 12). There is not even an exchange of
words. The absence of his mother and the tacit nature of his father contribute to his
having trouble to communicate. The narrator explicitly emphasizes Patrick’s desire to
26
be engaged in dialogues: “he wants conversation” (SL 10). During his childhood, the
“pale green and nameless” (SL 11) land of northern Ontario provides few human
interactions for young Patrick. And since his father seldom communicate with him, he
commences an interaction with animals that frequent his house, such as moths and
insects after his father falls into sleep. He is fascinated by them and gives them
nicknames: “Caspian, Nepal, Durago”, (SL 9), exotic names that he borrows from his
geography book. These exotic names reflect that Patrick is perhaps interested in other
cultures while young.
By saying that Patrick seems root-less, we mean that he carries with him few
cultural imprints. Because hardly is there any clue available for us to discern his
religious faith, his cultural traits, etc. However, Patrick is by no means a completely
rootless figure. Because we can trace down a few particularities to his identity. First
and foremost, English is his mother tongue. and his is more likely to be of Anglo
origin. Apart from that, there is also family inheritance. Though Hazen passes on little
to his son Patrick: “Hazen Lewis did not teach his son anything, no legend, no base of
theory” (SL 18), Hazen would give Patrick “abrupt lessons” (SL 19) on the
knowledge of explosives. When Patrick is fifteen, his father “made the one leap of his
life” (SL 15). He retires from his logger job to become a professional with explosives
in the logging industry. Back from work, Hazen “took off his shirt one evening and
threw it onto the campfire. The shirt fizzed and sprayed sparks over the knees of the
loggers” (SL 19). Patrick inherits from his father the knowledge of explosives and
would later use that in the tunnel under Lake Ontario, as he “carries out the old skill
he learned from his father- although then it had been in sunlight, in rivers, logs
tumbling over themselves slowly in the air” (SL 107).
It is worthy of note that in In the Skin of a Lion, Ondaatje has not yet created a
figure that is completely rootless. It was not until five years later when The English
Patient was published that Ondaatje carried on this discussion and overtly addresses
the problems of being rootless. Here we can see that Ondaatje’s understanding of
cosmopolitanism has been gradually evolving.
The merit with the indiscernible identity of Patrick is that it allows readers to
27
scrutinize the dynamic construction of Patrick’s identity. And our focus here is the
transformation of Patrick’s self during the process. Since Patrick’s root-less identity
deprives most of our preconceived expectations, our reading is more sensual than
reasonable, which in many cases can be biased. In other words, our conception relies
heavily on Patrick’s experience and narration. “In short, the reader, as subject, is
seduced by Patrick’s lack of identity into privileging an emotional response over a
cognitive one.” (Schumacher 6)
Patrick grows up in a rural area where immigrant workers are already hired. We
can see that though his hometown is located in a relatively remote area, it has already
seen the impact of economic globalization. Cosmopolitanism is no longer an
exclusive project for urbanists, for even a small town can become “the site of
strangeness” (Sennett 43) They form their own enclosed community “in the shacks
behind the Bellrock Hotel and have little connection with the town” (SL 8). The only
connection the loggers have with the town is “when they emerge to skate along the
line of river, on homemade skates, the blades made of old knives” (SL 8). The father
and son are strangers to readers as the immigrant loggers to them. The exposure to
strangers at an early age has prepared Patrick to transform his self psychologically.
More importantly, he comes to realize that he is interwoven in a larger community:
“He saw the interactions, saw how each one of them was carried by the strength of
something more than themselves” (SL 144). These “strangers of another language”
are the unknown others to young Patrick. Patrick’s curiosity about the unknown, as
Benjamin argues, is because “the notion of the unknown had a kind of force, a kind of
power of arousal in crowds” (Sennett, 43). This explains why Patrick would be
watching the collection of strangers before sunrise, observing them and wondering
about them. But Patrick has never interacted with these foreign loggers in his entire
childhood. As Jody Mason points out that “Patrick’s journey from passive observer to
political actor draws on and effaces the particular history of Finnish migrant
experiences” (Mason 73-4). He is still at an early stage of his transformation. It is true
that Patrick has always shown an interest in strangers. He “has clung like moss to
strangers, to the nooks and fissures of their situations” (SL 156). That provides him
28
the momentum to watch and search other’s stories.
But on certain occasions, young Patrick is indifferent to the world just like his
father who is “uninterested in the habits of civilization outside his own focus” (SL 15).
Born and raised in the rural area of Canada, he “knows nothing of the place” (SL 157).
His route from appreciating cultural diversity to practicing cosmopolitan empathy
would later prove to be a rather strenuous process.
Mysterious as Patrick remains, he has developed a hobby of reading while young,
a hobby that he keeps into his adulthood: “All his life Patrick Lewis has lived beside
novels and their clear stories” (SL 82). Benjamin argues that “The birthplace of the
novel is the solitary individual” (Benjamin 87), which means the act of reading
creates a milieu of solitariness. But reading is actually highly social in nature.
Reading is a major force that prepares Patrick for his later interactions with others.
Like a moth fluttering for light, Patrick is enlightened by the presence of others, eager
to read into their personal life. His curiosity of others and desire to learn about them is
exemplified by his never ceasing interest in the immigrant loggers. The obsession
lives into his twenties when he learns that Cato’s father, a foreign logger, “skated
across the lake holding up cattails on fire” (SL 151). He “finally had a name for that
group of men he witnessed as a child”. Jody Mason argues that “Each image of flame
against blackness conjures up the idea of literal or figurative illumination” (Mason 71).
Patrick’s loggers would be “an extension of hammer, drill, flame” (SL 26). They
ignite a fire that lures, if not guides, Patrick out of his darkness. His fascination of
cartography at an early age suggests his initial desire to explore the “vacant” continent
of North America that surrounds him and make connection with people far away. The
fact that he is eager to interact with these immigrants and not revolted by their foreign
ways exhibits a quality of a cosmopolitan in his young soul.
The second chapter ends the narrative of Patrick’s childhood and starts a
completely different story concerning the construction of the historical Prince Edward
Viaduct. It is not until the third chapter that Patrick reappears in the narrative. Patrick
is now twenty-one years old. The nine-year gap has not altered his inability to narrate
his personal history, for he must have remained his childhood lifestyle for this period
29
of time. His departure from the small town of Bellrock seems to be a forced one: “he
had been drawn out from that small town like a piece of metal” (SL 53). Immigrating
to a metropolitan city like Toronto is a passive choice, for Patrick “owned nothing,
had scarcely any money” (SL 53). Therefore, like many immigrant workers, Patrick
has to leave for Toronto for economic reasons. He has been “dropped under the vast
arches of Union Station” (SL 53) in Toronto. The marginality and weakness of the
working class is there immediately after his arrival. We can see that while settling in
Toronto, his childhood would appear his life in the form of memory. “What he
remembered was loving only things to do with colour…the warm brown universe of
barns, the breath and steam” (SL 53) According to Lacan, his clinging onto his
relationship with nature reveals his desire to mediate the tranquility in his personal
life, which is no longer accessible because of the economic force.
Though Patrick is of Anglo origin, the dominant majority in Canada, he belongs
to the impoverished. The contradiction here is likely to force readers, especially
readers of the same origin, to break their expectations for the Anglo origin. Patrick is
one of the marginalized whose voice could not be heard: “He spoke out his name and
it struggled up in a hollow echo and was lost in the high air of Union Station” (SL 54).
It is obvious he is still unable to narrate himself well. But “his desire to share
language” never dies. The Canadian novelist Robert Kroetsch famously phrases that
“we haven’t got an identity until somebody tells our story. The fiction makes us real”
(Krishnan 133).
Patrick is the protagonist who binds together the loosely connected cast of
characters. Through his job and life in Toronto, he encounters a group of people who
would hugely impact and even shape his understanding of cultural diversity and moral
obligations to others. Patrick is hired to search for a historical figure millionaire
Ambrose Small. Ironically, though Small owns everything that Patrick desires to have:
wealth and social status, he decides to disappear. As we know, the acquisition of self
is a dynamic process rather than a sedentary one. The nomadic job as a searcher helps
enlarge the process because it takes Patrick, and readers as well, from one place to
another while experiencing difference and otherness. Though there are brief accounts
30
of the nomadic journey of other characters, Patrick’s is the main one. Patrick is
Gilgamesh of the novel. It seems that there is always an impetus that pushes him to
another place. To begin with, it is his job as a searcher. Later, it is his revenge for
Alice, etc. Patrick, like Nicholas the bridge builder and Caravaggio the thief,
understands space. As Davey points out that “while Temelcoff has an intimately
physical knowledge of the space of his work under the bridge, Patrick memorizes the
geography of a room so well he can negotiate it blindfolded” (SL 73). In a similar
fashion, Caravaggio is “trained as a thief in unlit rooms, dismantling the legs of
kitchen table, unscrewing the backs of radios and the bottoms of toasters” (SL 189).
In other words, Ondaatje’s characters can manage to masterfully navigate through
geographical boundaries on their journeys, and not hindered by them.
While searching for Small, Patrick meets with Clara, Small’s actress mistress. To
Patrick, she is “rare and perfect” (SL 61). The moment Patrick eyes Clara, he is drawn
by her. The narrator points out that Clara’s physical appearance reminds Patrick of his
childhood obsessions with moths. The way she dresses resembles a damsel fly, an
animal whose language young Patrick spends nights studying. Clara seduces Patrick
while he is at a library. She exerts a huge influence on Patrick, both sexually and
psychologically.
Apart from the sexual attraction, Clara serves as the first person in Patrick’s life
to help him narrate his personal history. With Clara, Patrick manages to escape the
silence he used to experience with his father. During their long conversations, Clara
shares with him her own personal history. Her account ranges from trivia to serious
matters. Patrick starts to comprehend the importance of one’s past, which has meaning
and shapes one’s future. The personal narration is a process for Patrick to acquire his
subjectivity. Clara shares with him many of her childhood vignettes, enhancing his
awareness to narrate his life. One night, Clara is telling Patrick how she used to help
her father shave dogs. She opens her heart to him and reveals that her father “died of a
stroke” (SL 74) when she was fifteen. Hearing this, Patrick for the first time wants to
talk about his father’s death: “my father too… My father was a wizard, he could blow
logs right out of the water” (SL 74). Although he starts the topic, he switches it to
31
something else rather quickly:
He defended himself for most of the time with a habit of vagueness…There
was a wall in him that no one reached…A tiny stone swallowed years back
that had grown with him and which he carried around because he could not
shed it… Patrick and his small unimportant stone. It had entered him at the
wrong time in his life. (SL 71)
We can see that Patrick is still struggling with his ability and willingness to
narrate what truly matters to him. Clara comforts Patrick and encourages him to
continue narrating the death of his father. He eventually opens up and talks about the
accident in a feldspar that took away his father’s life. On his train to Toronto, this
detail has already appeared. But readers are not initially informed of the reason why
he has “a piece of feldspar in his pocket that his fingers had stumbled over during the
train journey” (SL 51). Without Clara, Patrick would probably never be able to
acknowledge his thoughts for his deceased father, needless to say to engage in any
conversation over important issues. Here again this important detail shows that
readers are more sensual than logical while reading the novel. Ondaatje is restrained
with his narrative as he does not reveal the story behind the death of Hazen. As
aforementioned, we rely on Patrick’s gradual formation of self to understand his
world. The conversation between Clara and Patrick, especially his improvement in
narrating and communicating is reflected in the sexual scene between them:
I’m going to come. Come in my mouth. Moving forward…he ejaculated,
disappearing into her. She crooked her finger, motioning, and he bent down
and put his mouth on hers. He took it, the white character, and they passed it
back and forth between them till it no longer existed, till they didn’t know
who had him like a lost planet somewhere in the body. (SL 68-69)
This scene functions as a metaphor for the initiation of narration between Clara
and Patrick. Later when Clara leaves for Small, Patrick commences writing letters to
her in order to express his unrequited love: “He loved the eroticism of her history, the
knowledge of where she sat in the classroom, her favourite brand of pencil at the age
of nine” (SL 69).
Here we can see that Patrick has fully broken the manacles of his inability to
narrate as he has succeeded in narrating himself, which prepares him to engage in
conversations with others, an important skill in cosmopolitan practice.

32
1.2 Cosmopolitanism from Below

Despite the fact that Ondaatje’s novels usually have global settings, he is often
addressed as a minority writer, which explains why critics like Mukherjee would
criticize Ondaatje because he has “refused to address himself to the particular needs
of his community”. His “eliding ‘race’ as an element of his writing” (Sanghera 62)
has fallen short of expectations for minority writers in general, especially for those
whose countries are plagued by conflicts and wars. But is it fair to conclude that
Ondaatje does not show any “trauma of uprooting” (Sanghera 62) based on the fact
that a particular post-colonial trauma does not prevail in his works? The question is
not hard to answer after we conduct a thorough reading of his works. During his long
career, Ondaatje has only written one novel concerning the Sri Lankan Civil War. His
characters come from different cultural backgrounds. By doing so, Ondaatje intends
to address an up-rootedness from a broader perspective, instead of confining to his
own ethnicity and country of origin. It is true that his characters sometimes do not
grieve over the fact that they are thrown, either voluntarily or forced, into a world full
of strangers. They are preoccupied with using, if not taking advantage of, the
opportunities of being placed among cultural differences. Despite the difficulties and
discomforts these characters would run into among strangers, the presence of them
has the potential to be turned into an opportunity to enrich themselves through culture
contact.
In this novel Michael Ondaatje reconstructs Toronto in the early half of the
twentieth century. This city is known for its cultural plurality since its establishment,
now with foreign-born people accounting for nearly half of its population. Ondaatje
realistically recreates the multicultural aspect of Toronto in the novel. Hana, a
fictional character, describes the multicultural city as follows:
Hoo’s Trading Company where Alice bought herbs for fever, gaslit diners
whose aquarium windows leaned against the street. They watched the
water-nymph follies at Sunnyside Park, watched the Italian gymnasts at the
Elm Street gym, heard the chanting of English lessons to large groups at

33
 Central Neighbourhood House. . . But Hana’s favourite place of spells was the
Geranium Bakery and the Balkan Café. (SL 138)
This imagery vividly presents Toronto as a city of diverse ethnicities, revealing a
multicultural society emerging early in the 1930s. The historical events included in
the novel are the building of certain local facilities, such as the Bloor Viaduct (1917)
and the Toronto Waterworks (1930s). Ondaatje comments in an interview that “If
there was a kind of direction in the book, it was making sure that something got said,
to write about that unofficial thing that was happening” (Fagan 5). In the Skin of a
Lion addresses major issues concerning immigrant workers, who have made huge
contribution to the development of Toronto. However, there are few accounts of these
workers in the Canadian official documentaries. This is because their voice is usually
silenced by those who are on politically and economically higher ladders. For instance,
the disappearance of the fictional character Ambrose Small, who is a historical figure
as well, had fueled myriads of reports in the newspaper in real life. While for people
like Patrick Lewis, an “immigrant to the city” (SL 53), his name and story is nowhere
to be found in any official account. The novel shifts our attention to them by telling
stories of bridge builders, tanners and butchers. These immigrant workers struggle to
make a living in Canada. Coming from different cultures around the world, they may
differ tremendously from each other. But when upon arrival in Canada, they share
many similar difficulties. To begin with, none of them speaks English well. Therefore,
they all have to learn English to get a job in the new world. But what stands in the
way is more than learning a new language. They have little choice but to do some of
the dirtiest and toughest jobs that are available. Take the tanners for instance:
Dye work took place in the courtyards next to the warehouse. Circular pools
had been cut into the stone - into which the men leapt waist-deep within the
reds and ochres and greens, leapt in embracing the skins of recently
slaughtered animals. In the round wells four-foot in diameter they heaved and
stomped, ensuring the dye went solidly into the pores of the skin that had been
part of a live animal the previous day. And the men stepped out in colours up
to their necks, pulling wet hides out after them so it appeared they had
removed the skin from their own bodies. They had leapt into different colours
as if into different countries. (SL 130)

34
 The bright colors may seem a brilliant spectacle at first glance. It is unlikely to
be associated with the suffering of the immigrant workers. However, when we look
more closely, the carefully designed imagery actually critiques the seemingly
harmonious multicultural society of Canada, a country that is a combination of
“different colours as if… different countries” (SL 130). Ondaatje shifts our attention
to the life of the immigrant workers employed to dye these animal skins. Contrary to
their “colorful” working environment, their life is ironically a colorless one. They are
endangering their own health in the horrible working conditions. The foul smell does
not only intrude the pores of animal skins; it penetrates the immigrant workers as well.
The permanent foul smell is so pungent that it even repels their wives: “They must
turn and kill the animals in the slaughter-houses. And the smell of the tanning
factories goes into their noses and lungs and stays there for life. They never get the
smell off their bodies” (SL 124). Ondaatje questions the ideology of treating the
multicultural Canada as a just society where issues caused by racial, ethnical and
religious differences do not exist. He purposefully employs Patrick Lewis as the
protagonist, a presumably white Canadian native of Anglo origin. The arrangement
distances readers from their preconceived expectations, thus preparing them for the
cosmopolitan conversation in the novel.
The life and working environment of immigrant workers in the novel are tightly
associated with the “darkness” image, which implies their marginality in the society.
This historiography of Ondaatje’s gives them unprecedented attention. By telling
stories about certain lesser known aspects of their life, such as their love story and
working experience, Ondaatje treats them as individuals instead of only being part of
the collective, as they would usually appear in grand narratives. Reading the novel
from the perspective of cosmopolitanism, this chapter reveals Ondaatje’s
representation of the confluence of cultures and the cultivation of moral obligation to
others in the novel. This is a theme that will be explored in detail below.
As discussed earlier, the genealogy of cosmopolitanism includes a few frequent
yet confusing concepts, such as: nationalism, multiculturalism, etc. To understand
cosmopolitanism in relation to these alternatives, it is of great importance to clarify
35
the difference between them, for the they sometimes overlap to a confusing extent. In
the case of this novel, it is multiculturalism that is put under a microscope. When
asked what inspired and motivated him to compose the novel, Ondaatje claimed in a
1990 interview that he believed “Canada has always been a very racist society and it’s
getting more so” (Jodi 17). The novel was published in 1987. A year later, the
Canadian federal government passed The Canadian Multiculturalism Act for the
preservation and enhancement of multiculturalism in Canada. However, the preamble
actually contains incompatible descriptions, take the language part for instance:
AND WHEREAS the Constitution of Canada and the Official Languages Act
provide that English and French are the official languages of Canada and
neither abrogates nor derogates from any rights or privileges acquired or
enjoyed with respect to any other language;2
With English and French being the official languages of Canada, it is difficult to
maintain immigrant’s own mother tongue and culture. In fact, immigrant workers like
Nicholas cannot even keep their own names: the labor agent give them all English
names. “Charlie Johnson, Nick Parker. They remembered the strange foreign syllables
like a number.” (SL 131) Being financially and politically marginal, they have to
accept the fact that their cultural attachments are relentlessly and uncompromisingly
erased. They are also coerced to communicate in English: “if they speak this way in
public, in any language other than English, they will be jailed. A rule of the city” (SL
133). This “rule of the city” reveals there is indeed a center of culture in the
multicultural Canadian society.
There has been a heated debate over the failure of multiculturalism in Canada.
Interculturalism and cosmopolitanism are brought up as the potential alternatives.
Ondaatje critiques multiculturalism by pointing out the existence of mainstream
culture in Canada. But what he intends to accomplish in his novels is not to come up
with a political project to replace multiculturalism, nor is it my task here. It is to
cultivate a cosmopolitan self and empathy that he has instilled in the novel, which

2
http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-18.7/page-1.html

36
would undoubtedly contribute to the building of a community of shared future in an
era that is characteristic of cultural plurality.
Ondaatje believes that novels “can be a permanent and political reflection of
your time” (Jodi 17). He sets the story in the early twentieth century, scrutinizing the
origins of the current racism and social imbalance instead of diving into the
complicacy of the current era. In the 1920s, Canada was being transformed into an
industrialized nation. Immigrant laborers from all over the world have made a
significant contribution to its development. The novel selects the constructions of
several historical infrastructures, such as the Bloor Street Viaduct in 1917, the
Toronto Waterworks in the 1930s, etc. Therefore, a major thematic discussion centers
around the immigrant experience. People of various nationalities left their country of
origin for a variety of reasons. It is commonly believed that economic globalization
provides a major momentum for the human migration. Because of this, economic
globalization has been criticized to be responsible for the problems that occur during
cross-cultural interactions. The novel is abundant with characters immigrating to
Canada under the influence of globalization, take the protagonist Patrick for instance.
In addition, the novel includes other major factors for mass migration, such as social
unrests, conflicts and wars, all of which perhaps should have taken more criticism
than economic globalization. Take Nicholas’s personal history for instance, he arrived
in Canada in 1914 to escape the Balkan Wars (1912-1913). He fled “with three
friends on horseback” (SL 45) after his village got burned down. They went through a
strenuous journey in Europe then to North America, with two of Nicholas’s friends
died on the trip.
With the development of transportation and the enhancing transnational
co-operation, people nowadays cross national borders more and more frequently. As a
result, the interaction between the local and the global is increasing. The confluence
of cultures at lower class level, that of the migrant workers in particular, offers new
perspectives for us to think of cosmopolitanism. It is generally assumed that elites are
more likely to become cosmopolitans because they are more likely to afford the
luxury of moving between different countries. However, the economic cooperation
37
opens up opportunities for people with less fortune as well. With the number climbing
up and the phenomenon being normalized, it is of great necessity and importance to
address such issues, such as politics of cultural interaction and the potential of
forming a cosmopolitan community, etc. The fact that Ondaatje’s novel is set in
Toronto during the first half of 20th century provides us a chance to clarify the
differences between multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. In such a multicultural
city, the cultural and ethical other abound. Upon arrival, Patrick, “a native Canadian”,
is placed in a world full of strangers. But the cultural other is a structured product. As
Hall argues that “Identity is always… a structured representation which only achieves
its positive through the narrow eye of the negative. It has to go through the eye of the
needle of the other before it can construct itself” (Hall 1991: 2).
Throughout his work and life, Patrick encounters and interacts with a world of
strangers he could not identify. Immigrant laborers like Nicholas come from countries
whose histories and cultures remain unknown to Patrick: “the dye washers and cutter,
men from the killing beds, the sausage maker… the thirty of so of them knowing little
more than each other’s false names or true countries” (SL 135). On Sunday afternoons,
after they bathe under the pipes, “the thirty or so of them knowing little more than
each other’s false names or true countries”. They would greet each other on the street
by saying “Hey Italy” and “Hey Canada” with a wave. Patrick “knew nothing about
the men around him except how they moved and laughed” (SL 136).
While working in the tannery with other immigrant workers, Patrick “never
spoke to them or answered them” (SL 136). He is by far still on the verge of
transforming from being interested in difference to embracing difference:
He is the one born in this country who knows nothing of the place. The Finns
of his childhood used the river, even knew it by night, the men of burning
rushes delirious in the darkness. This he had never done. He was a watcher, a
corrector. (SL 82)
But the fact that Patrick knows little about them encourages him to engage with
them even more as Benjamin echoes in his argument that “the notion of the unknown
had a kind of force, a kind of power of arousal in crowds” (qtd. in Sennett 43). It is
Patrick’s willingness to engage with the otherness and difference that prepares him to

38
fully engage in cosmopolitan practice.
Although Ondaatje does not address the tension between cosmopolitanism and
nationalism in this novel as overtly as he does in The English Patient, he blurs the
geographical concept of Canada here. As Frank Davey observes that this novel does
not “inhabit any social geography that can be called ‘Canada’” (Davey 259). Davey
continues to argue that the novel creates a “post-national space, in which sites are as
interchangeable as postcards, in which discourses are transnational and in which
political issues are constructed on non-national (and often ahistorical) ideological
grounds” (Davey 259). But this dissertation proposes a different interpretation. To
begin with, we have to acknowledge the mobility shown by the characters. But is it
enough to prove that transnationalism equals post-nationalism? And more importantly,
does Ondaatje advocate a society that abandons the geographical and ideological
boundaries between nation-states? A thorough analysis of the novel and Ondaatje’s
other works would provide a negative answer. For the sake of discussion of this issue,
I offer a brief reading of two other novels in the following paragraph, which would be
fully explored in the following chapters of this dissertation. In The English Patient,
the so-called English Patient attempts to categorize himself and the Sikh soldier as
International Bastards, who are “born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere.
Fighting to get back to or get away from our homelands all our lives” (EP 188). In the
beginning, the Sikh soldier believes in this kind of rootlessness and has detached
himself from his country of origin. He adapts to the British culture so that he can
serve in the British army, despite the fact that he is an invisible person in the West. At
last when he learns about the atomic bombs in Japan, he experiences an epiphany and
confronts the English Patient vis-à-vis. Eventually he returns to his hometown. If the
tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism is tackled in the theoretical arena,
an abandoned villa where people of different nationalities interact without actual
ideological manacles, Anil’s Ghost deals with problem of the local and global in a
more straightforward way that includes an investigation in which patriotism is at stake.
This said, it is safe to conclude that Ondaatje is in favor of a rooted cosmopolitanism
instead of a rootless one which requires people to detach from their national and
39
cultural roots. After a brief look at Ondaatje’s fictions in general, we will come back
to this novel. As aforementioned, the novel is set in the early half of the twentieth
century Toronto. And given that Ondaatje’s novels are actually content-realism and
form-postmodernism, the transnationalism in the novel can best and most precisely be
perceived as pre-nationalism. That is to say back then the multicultural society of
Canada is still being shaped. Therefore, the non-national space in his literary
imagination is in fact typical Canadian, a highly national space which mirrors the
cultural plurality of the world at large.
Mass immigration, which increases the physical interactions among people, is
not the only factor that has an impact on the human connectivity. The advanced
communication technology offers people the possibility of transnational connectivity,
perhaps in an even more extensive yet penetrative way. The 1930s witnessed a grand
development of media, with the media culture gradually becoming an integral part of
everyday life and “shaping values and expectations accordingly” (Tomlinson 353).
The theme of print media, as well as other forms of media, such as radio and film, is
recurrent in the novel.
The media cultural landscape in Ondaatje’s imaginative Toronto is undoubtedly a
primeval one compared with the current era which is characteristic of ubiquitous
media. But in the twenty-first century, media has already become an intrinsic aspect to
the world we live in. It is a cultural experience upon which the public no longer
reflects because they regard it as a norm that they instinctive follow. The imagined
Toronto in the 1930s in the novel, however, offers us a chance to alienate ourselves
from a tightly connected globe that has been taken for granted. This enables us to take
a look at an earlier phase of the connectivity and understand its logic and impact
better.
The problem of global mass culture is its power to homogenize. Hall argues that
there is a new form of globalization in America. In terms of culture, it refers to a “new
form of global mass culture” (Hall 28). Global mass culture is largely conveyed by
modern media technologies. With the development of these media technologies,
voices, images and even videos are capable of transcending national and cultural
40
boundaries more and more easily. For instance, to flourish in Toronto, immigrant
workers have to speak English and listen to the same English programs. This issue
raises a lot of concerns among scholars, especially certain non-western scholars. They
are concerned that the global may threaten the local, with the global in many cases
being essentially Western. But the process is more complicated than what this kind of
overgeneralized logic can cover. It is therefore pivotal to figure out the working
mechanism of the presumably homogenizing force of global mass culture in relation
to local and regional culture. Is local culture waiting to be “incorporate, eaten up by
the all-seeing eye of global capital” as the latter marches into its region? (Kwok-Bun
191)
Although both characters are immigrants to Toronto, the way Temelcoff builds
his identity is very different from that of Patrick’s. To begin with, Temelcoff has to
acquire English before he can make a living in Canada, needless to say his dream of
owning a bakery: “If he did not learn the language he would be lost” (SL 45). With
Temelcoff, Ondaatje puts emphasis on a recurrent image in the novel: the bridge. In
fact, the bridge image prevails in most of his novels, such as The English Patient and
Anil’s Ghost. In the Skin of a Lion is no exception. The construction of the Bloor
Street Viaduct in the novel functions as a workplace where immigrants of different
backgrounds meet and interact with each other. As a geographical linking point,
bridge has long been used as a metaphor for making connections. In the novel,
workers on the bridge come from different countries. Their nationalities, languages,
religions all differ. The Bloor Street Viaduct is expected to bridge gaps: “The bridge
goes up in a dream. It will link the east end with the centre of the city. It will carry
traffic, water and electricity across the Don Valley. It will carry trains that have not
even been invented yet” (SL 26). The bridge provides them a chance to learn about
common differences through co-operation and communication. In addition, this gives
them a chance to deal with problems caused by their differences, which holds the
powerful potential to practice cosmopolitanism.
The bridge does not solely focus on cultural difference. It is politically charged
as well. The bridge brings together Rowland C. Harris, one of the historically
41
documented white men with power, and Nicholas Temelcoff, one the of many
forgotten bridge builders. Though intellectuals tend to advance the new ‘ism’ “as a
solution to the wrongs of the world” (Anderson-Gold 3), the way cosmopolitanism
works is by promoting cosmopolitan conversations and other indirect ways. Therefore,
by bringing two characters who are on different rungs on the social ladder, Ondaatje
does not intend to solve the problem caused by the disparity of power through
violence, which explains why Patrick fails to sabotage the waterworks and ends up
having a conversation over moral obligations and power. Such conversations help
bridge the gaps caused by political difference.
Leaving the library, Patrick encounters a street-band, his footsteps clicking
unconsciously to adapt themselves to the music that surrounds him. He becomes
aware that “he could add music by simply providing the thread of a hum” (SL 144).
This scene functions as a trope for the confluence of people and the strength generated
by this kind of culture contact:
The street-band had depicted perfect company, with an ending full of
embraces after the solos had made everyone stronger, more delineated. His
own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling
together of accomplices. Patrick saw a wondrous night web - all of these
fragments of a human order, something ungoverned by the family he was born
into or the headlines of the day. A nun on a bridge, a daredevil who was
unable to sleep without drink, a boy watching a fire from his bed at night, an
actress who ran away with a millionaire - the detritus and chaos of the age was
realigned. (SL 144-145)
Patrick’s observation of the street band mirrors Walt Whitman’s response to
immigrants which is depicted in Ric Burns’s documentary film New York. Marshall
Berman notes that Walt Whitman was “tremendously excited by the traffic, by the
noise, by the immigrants getting off the boat… and he had the sense that the power of
the city comes out of these people” (Patell 3). Take Temelcoff for instance, he is a
daredevil figure on the bridge, even famous among all the builders. Thus, he is given
all the difficult jobs and he never turns them down:
He descends into the air with no fear. He is a solitary. He assembles ropes,
brushes the tackle and pulley at his waist, and falls off the bridge like a diver
over the edge of a boat. The rope roars alongside him, slowing with the
pressure of his half-gloved hands. He is burly on the ground and then falls

42
 with terrific speed, grace, using the wind to, push himself into corners of
abutments so he can check driven rivets, sheering valves, the drying of the
concrete under bearing plates and padstones. He stands in the air banging the
crown pin into the upper cord and then shepherds the lower cord's slip-joint
into position. (SL 34)
His work ethic embodies the power of the people from below. What he does on
the construction site is that “He links everyone” (SL 34-35). The novel exemplifies
how individuals of different ethnicities and classes transcend the confines of these
boundaries. Cosmopolitan interactions require and encourage tolerating wisdom to
establish relationships with those differences present. Cosmopolitanism, as Patell
argues, “can now be understood as a perspective that regards human difference as an
opportunity to be embraced rather than a problem to be solved” (Patell 4).

1.3 The Donning of the Skin

One of the two epigraphs in the novel is taken from the ancient Akkadian poem
titled The Epic of Gilgamesh. The Epic, acknowledged as one of the earliest great
works of literature, tells the story of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk. The first half of the
epic tells the story of a wild man named Enkidu who is sent by the gods to prevent
Gilgamesh from oppressing his people. However, the two characters befriend each
other after their initial hostile interactions. Later, they undertake an adventure during
which they slaughter the Bull of Heaven. As a punishment, the gods kill Enkidu. The
second half unfolds the story after the death of Enkidu. Devastated because of the
death of his companion, Gilgamesh dons the skin of a lion and wanders in the
wilderness. He embarks upon a prolonged and strenuous journey searching for the
secret of eternality. There is a loosely constructed parallel between the two texts in
that after Alice gets killed in a political protest, Patrick plans to revenge for the death
of his lover. Like Gilgamesh, Patrick embarks upon a journey as well. He attempts to
set a hotel on fire, because of which he gets arrested. When released from prison, he

43
works on a scheme to confront Harris in person, who he deems is responsible for the
death of Alice.
The “intertextualized” text is of East origin, while the setting is a West one. In
fact, the choice per se is a cosmopolitan practice. The success of the novel perfectly
exemplifies the strength and opportunities that cultural contamination promises.
The skin of wild animals is echoed in the novel as Alice describes a play to
Patrick in which several actresses share the role of the heroine:
After half an hour the powerful matriarch removed her large coat from which
animal pelts dangled and she passed it, along with her strength, to one of the
minor characters. In this way even a silent daughter could put on the cloak and
be able to break through her chrysalis into language. Each person had their
moment when they assumed the skins of wild animals, when they took
responsibility for the story. (SL 82)
The skin of wild animals is a major trope of the novel in terms of cosmopolitan
discussion. We will come back to it later in this section. It would take an extremely
strenuous process for Patrick to understand Alice’s story of responsibility. Because as
earlier discussed, Patrick has always been “alien, the third person in the picture” (SL
156). Though born in Canada, he knows little about the place. As a child, he used to
be curious about the Finnish loggers in his town. But he has not really made an effort
to know about them. It is not until he encounters Alice that he learns about the
loggers:
But it was only now that he learned of the union battles up north where Cato
was murdered some time in the winter of 1921, and found under the ice of a
shallow creek near Onion Lake a week after he had written his last letter…
And all of his life Patrick had been oblivious to it, a searcher gazing into the
darkness of his own country, a blind man dressing the heroine. (SL 157)
The novel borrows a number of scenes from the East epic. After the death of
Enkidu, Gilgamesh visits a garden where he confesses to a woman about his grief. In
a similar way, on his way to deliver his revenge for the death of Alice, Patrick
encounters a blind woman with whom he shares his sorrow. The nature of the garden
functions as a bridge that associate the two distinct individuals. Patrick is taken back
to his childhood years when he is not aware of the ideological categories that separate
people from others. The difference-absent state of mind enables Patrick to experience

44
a very unique feeling that “is not shock or disgust but something else” (SL 170).
Elizabeth’s green eye resembles the lunar moth that Patrick once loves as a child.
Patrick now sees from the blind woman’s perspective “the woman shifts the watery
green mirror of her eye attempting to reflect everything around her” (SL 170). When
they return to the bench after the tour of the garden, Elizabeth “grips his hand, not
letting go of him” (SL 171). Patrick feels that “she receives all of his qualities, in this
still garden” (SL 171). Patrick’s qualities are thus understood by Elizabeth. It does not
require an acceptance here. The word “receive” suggests that a cosmopolitan practice
is done between the two individuals of obvious differences, both of them being open
to each other and able to make a virtue out of the comfort and discomfort along with
such interactions. The connection transcends all the presumable boundaries.
Patrick’s interaction with strangers increases his understanding of them, turning
his interest into an involvement. Ondaatje arranges a linguistic scene where Patrick
the English-speaking character is placed in a situation that is common with immigrant
workers, purposefully creating a normally unfamiliar and slightly unpleasant
experience for his readers, readers who share Patrick’s origin in particular. When
Clara leaves Patrick, she entrusts her blind iguana to him as a reminder. To feed the
pet, Patrick has to roam around the city to find the right food for it. That’s when he
steps into an alien community formed by immigrant workers. Stuart Hall terms this
feature as “new identities” of the local, which are organized around difference.
Dwellers in this community are physically separated from their country of origin. The
setting of the neighborhood is meticulously designed in accordance to their particular
culture: “the small memory painting of Europe on the wall- the spare landscape, the
village imposed on it” (SL 133). Other small details also reflect their ethnical and
cultural origins, for instance, the walls in a local restaurant is painted with foliage, a
Mediterranean touch. Immigrant workers share their rootlessness in the diasporic
community.
Apart from physical contact with strangers, Patrick’s habit of reading also
enables him to learn more about the immigrant workers, which exposes their
unbearable suffering to him. For instance, Cato’s letters record the union battles that
45
took place in the north during which Cato was killed. The history lesson ignites
Patrick to be more politically engaged, which he used to avoid. In addition, Patrick
learns about the documents of the Bloor Street Viaduct, a monumental facility
constructed at the cost of suffering of immigrant laborers like Nicholas. But these
workers are completely ignored in the official writings:
The articles and illustrations he found in the Riverdale Library depicted every
detail about the soil, the wood, the weight of concrete, everything but
information on those who actually built the bridge. (SL 145)
By reading their suffering, Patrick gradually “feels into” them. This explains
why he recognizes his moral obligations to other. To revenge for the tragic death of
Alice, Patrick sets the Muskoka Hotel on fire. Afterwards, he enters in the Garden of
the Blind where he encounters Elizabeth. Patrick confesses to the stranger that he is
wanted by the police for he has done willful destruction of property. But the blind
woman does not express any disgust. She reminds Patrick to put balm on “a welt by
his ear” (SL 170), which she touches when “she puts her hands up bluntly to his face
and searches him” (170). It is reasonable to deduce that Elizabeth should be rich given
that she dwells in the resort area and the garden that she owns is delicately and
intricately designed. Patrick differs from Elizabeth in many aspects, such as social
status and gender. The filament that connects the two subjects in this garden is
sympathy. Patrick at that time is in fact extremely anxious because of what he has
done to the Muskoka Hotel. Although Elizabeth the blind woman recognizes that
Patrick “is alien here” (SL 167), she remains open to the stranger. Patrick is reticent in
the beginning, only mouthing “yes” when Elizabeth talks to him. During their
interaction, Elizabeth shows the garden to Patrick, introducing the various plants there.
This resonates with Patrick given that Patrick used to be intrigued by nature when he
was young and dwelling in the countryside, which partially explains Patrick’s gradual
trust in Elizabeth. Therefore, Patrick voluntarily confesses to Elizabeth about his
crime when the latter shows sympathy to his welt.
With the help of his old cellmate Caravaggio, Patrick makes an unsuccessful
attempt to sabotage the waterworks. When meeting with Utnapishtim, who was
granted eternal life, Gilgamesh is challenged to stay awake for six days and seven
46
nights. Gilgamesh falls into sleep at last. On his way to dynamite the waterworks,
Patrick also falls into sleep when confronting Harris. Unlike Gilgamesh, Patrick
enters the room not to bring back Alice’s life. He is there to understand the secret of
power. Sneaking into Harris’s office, Patrick finally meets the millionaire Harris
vis-à-vis. Patrick threatens to press the plunger on a blasting-box, forcing Harris into a
conversation that normally is not likely to happen given their distinct positions on the
social ladder.
Patrick’s two attempts to confront the authorities reflect his transformation into a
cosmopolitan. After the tragic death of Alice, Patrick sets the hotel on fire as an act of
revenge. As Patrick’s lover, Alice is close to him. According to Stoic concept
oikeiHsis, it is natural for Patrick to grieve over the death of Alice. But the novel
presents more than personal and intimate connection. To a large extent, the novel is
politically charged as it is attuned to certain social issues. Jodi Lundgren claims that
the novel can be read “as an implicit critique of the ongoing racial stratification in
contemporary Canadian society” (Gerber 10). Therefore, the differences in the context
goes beyond the personal realm. Also included in the discussion are ethnical, cultural
and political realms. For his second scheme, Patrick has a bigger community in mind:
“You forgot us… Do you know how many of us died in there” (SL 235-236)? His
affection and care for people close to the “bullseye” has grown into a much larger one
that encompasses the entire community of laborers who are of different nationalities
and ethnicities. He has been transformed into a person who shoulders the moral
responsibility to others, embodying a virtue known as cosmopolitan empathy. To put
it simply, it is “love for others beyond our self”. (McCulloch 10). Etymologically, the
English word didn’t exist till the early twentieth century. It was a translation of the
German word Einfuehlung, meaning “feel into”. The Introduction of this dissertation
has elaborated the confusing relationship between empathy and empathy.
During a conversation with Clara, Patrick reveals the death of his father “He got
killed setting charges in a feldspar mine” (SL 74). But back then, it never occurs to
Patrick the authorities should be responsible for his father’s tragedy, needless to
mention other immigrant workers who have experienced similar tragedies. However,
47
the suffering of bridge builders and loggers enlightens him to find out who are behind
their suffering. It further encourages him to muster up enough courage to voice and
even act for immigrant workers who at the bottom of social hierarchies. When the
intertextual character Gilgamesh encounters a pride of lions, he kills them and uses
the lion skins for covering. Echoing Gilgamesh, Patrick metaphorically dons the skin
of a lion and assumes responsibilities for others. Towards the end, in the car Hana
asks Patrick about Clara. Patrick is now confident and willing with his story-telling
“She was your mother’s best friend. I’ll tell you the whole story” (SL 244). The novel
“is a story a young girl gathers in a car during the early hours of the morning” (SL 1),
the girl being Hana and the driver being Patrick. The story includes Alice, Cato,
representatives of those marginalized and silenced figures. By telling their stories,
Patrick shoulders responsibility for them. Ondaatje does not intend to confront the
official narrative with his version. Rather, he is more concerned with the Patrick being
able to offer his narrative, which serves to assume responsibilities for other people.
With more and more people migrating to hybrid communities like the Canadian
one that Ondaatje represents in the novel, the cultivation of a cosmopolitanism is
becoming an urgent project. It helps people to understand themselves in the
transnational context and their relation with the rest of the world.
Michael Ondaatje is himself a mix of multiple subject perspectives: born in Sri
Lanka, educated in the UK and then Canada. His nomadism is made possible because
of the increasing global fluidity. It has become a demographical norm as there are
more and more people experiencing such fluidity.
Instead of articulating for a diasporic community of one’s own origin in the
novel, Michael Ondaatje keenly broadens his writing to include many other
communities. The novel successfully and vividly creates the life of Macedonian and
other European immigrant workers. Literary works are capable of thinking beyond
national boundaries. This has been made possible due to the development of global
mass culture, which creates a context “for reimagining, organizing, and disseminating
subjectivity through all the devices formally associated with literary narrative” (Paul
100).
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Chapter Two The Rootless Cosmopolitanism in The English

Patient

The English Patient is without doubt Ondaatje’s most known novel, which has a
lot to do with the commercial success of Anthony Minghella’s award-winning film
under the same title. It is noted for being a postmodernist novel as the narrative
constantly shifts from the deserts to the deserted villa, transcending both temporal and
spatial boundaries.
The novel is set in the war-torn Italy before the end of the Second World War.
Ondaatje skillfully depicts four distinct characters, with their fates intricately
interwoven. The title of the novel comes from a character in the novel: a severely
burnt man who is referred to as the English patient since he speaks the language
fluently. The fictional character is based on the historical figure Laszlo Ede Almásy,
an Austrian monarchist born in 1895. Ondaatje explains in the acknowledgements: “it
is important to stress that this story is a fiction and that the portraits of the characters
who appear in it are fictional, as are some of the events and journeys” (EP 322). The
fictional Almásy is an enthusiastic explorer busy mapping the desert with his
colleagues from “oasis society”. Though having survived a plane crash during the war,
Almásy has completely lost his mobility, lying in bed all day long in need of constant
care on a daily basis. His face is no longer recognizable. His unique physical
condition renders him a closed book. When captured, the British Army could not
decide which side he is on since his identity resembles liquid, which is elusive and
evaporative. The unique condition rejects an easy conclusion about whether he is an
enemy or ally to the British. In the ruined villa, Almásy displays an encyclopedic
understanding of the world, with topics ranging from bombs in the war to dunes in the
desert. He claims that “all I needed was the name of a small ridge, a local custom, a
cell of this historical animal, and the map of the world would slide into place.” (EP
20)
The settings that Ondaatje creates in the novel offer us a social milieu where

49
some of the main issues of cosmopolitanism are reflected upon, especially two
concepts that are tightly associated with violence: nationalism and hospitality. Though
postmodernist novels are known for their deconstructive force, what Ondaatje intends
to accomplish in this novel is not to deconstruct for the sake of construction. Rather,
his representation of a four-member community provides readers an alternative
perspective to nationalism, which is of great value to the building of a Community of
Shared Future. I will come back to this later in this chapter to examine in what way
does Ondaatje’s trademark narrative contribute to the discussion of cosmopolitanism.
Ondaatje originally planned to compose a trilogy in the beginning, including In
the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient. Therefore, in terms of the characters, there
is a continuation between the two novels. Alice’s daughter Hana is now in her
twenties. She is trained as a nurse at Women’s College Hospital. Her father Patrick
dies in the war. She is also traumatized by the tragic deaths of her unborn child.
Though a caregiver, she is in fact in need of care herself. When her hospital relocates
to another place, she stubbornly decides to stay with the burned man. Hana is
accustomed to finding consolation reading books in the Villa’s library: “This was the
time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became
half her world” (EP 7). Whereas Patrick’s cellmate Caravaggio continues his
occupation as a thief. In the second novel, he is employed as a spy by the British
Intelligence, who sends him to collect information in North Africa during the war. He
is later captured by the German and has lost two thumbs. As a longtime friend of
Hana’s deceased father, he tracks down Hana the moment he learns about her
whereabouts. During his stay in the villa, he attempts to figure out the identity of the
English patient out of concern for Hana’s safety because he believes the English
patient has been a German spy. There is an extension of characters, including the
young Indian Sikh Kirpal Singh who volunteers to be a sapper in the British army.
The narrative impetus partially relies on Caravaggio’s obsessive attempt to reveal
the English patient’s true identity. The burnt man’s reminiscing makes up for another
part of the narrative. Apart from that, there is also the tentative romance between
Hana and Kip and Caravaggio’s account as a spy, etc.
50
2.1 An Alternative to Nationalism

Given that Ondaatje’s novels are teeming with depictions of human conflicts, it
is safe to conclude that as a writer he holds a pessimistic conception of history. The
image of plane crash, with the English patient burning and falling out of the sky, to
some extent reminds us of Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Angelus Novus, the
angel of history. In Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin studies
Klee’s painting Angelus Nous, seeing it as the “angel of history”:
His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one
pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we
perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling
wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like
to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a
storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such
violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly
propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris
before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Benjamin
257-258)
The angel of history is being blown into the future. But we can tell that it is
unwilling to leave the past yet as it turns its head to the past. There is genuine concern
in its gaze at the piles of “wreckage upon wreckage”. Progress in the angel’s eye is no
other than catastrophes. The angel turns to the past and gazes at the “wreckage upon
wreckage”. The pile of wreckages is the progress that people think they are making.
The angel wants to stay and salvage human beings who are not yet aware of the
situation. But the relentless wind is blowing him into the future. Almásy attempts to
fly Katharine’s dead body out of the desert. His attempt to save a dead past is destined
to fail as he ends up burning in the crash. This crashing plane is used as a parallel to
the angel of history. The English Patient takes place during the Second World War
when the world was plagued by the war. At that period of time, humankind did not
live in The Garden of Eden. Instead, they inhabited a profane world that resembles the
ruined villa that Hana and her burned patient dwell, deserted and full of dangers.
Throughout Ondaatje’s career, he has shown a similar attitude towards history. The

51
English Patient, depicts the devastating stories happen during the war with Hana
losing his father, Caravaggio his hand, Almásy badly burned, and eventually the
atomic bomb in Hiroshima. In Anil’s Ghost, Ondaatje paints a vivid and horrific
picture of the death of many innocent civilians. Ondaatje maps a history that is filled
with a variety of wreckages caused by the violence. Ondaatje and Benjamin both
perceive human history as fragmented and unprogressive. This novel puts special
emphasis on human conflicts, shedding light on the nature of conflicts. The
apocalyptic conception of history explains the urgency for a collective effort from all
peoples of the world. Ondaatje does give up hope for salvation and his remedy is the
cultivation of cosmopolitanism.
Bed-ridden in the Italian Villa, which resembles “that dead knight in Ravenna”
(EP 144), the English patient experiences so much physical agony that he has to rely
on morphine to reduce the pain. His mind is not trapped in the cage of time and space
for he finds consolation imagining and reminiscing the period of time when he spends
in the deserts. Hana deems that his “sleeping body is probably miles away in the
desert” (EP 37). He would mainly tell stories concerning two aspects: his occupation
as an explorer and his tragic romance with Katharine. In the course of telling his
personal story, Almásy preaches his understanding of history, nation, which are some
of the major issues in regards to cosmopolitan structure of thoughts.
As a cartographer, Almásy excels at navigating in the desert. He claims that he is
“a man who can recognize and unnamed town by its skeletal shape on a map” (EP 19).
While mapping the desert, Almásy experiences the transformational force of the
desert. The English word desert, which is used to describe a wasteland, is
etymologically derived from the Latin word desertum, literally meaning “thing
abandoned”. To travel in the desert, one has to give up many aspects of their life. In
the novel, Almásy’s companion Madox could not stay away from the desert:
“He is a desert man after all, having left his family’s village of Marston
Magna, Somerset, altered all customs and habits so he can have the proximity
to sea level as well as regular dryness.” (EP 172)
The desert provides Madox a harbor away from his country of origin, his family.
It is not a home, because desert man like Madox abandons the familial affiliation and
52
other cultural roots. It forces them to get rid of their old customs and habits. The
attachment to a certain culture is cut off in the vastness of the desert. Resonating with
Edmond Jabès, a French writer and poet of an Egyptian origin, who thus penned “you
do not go into the desert to find identity but to lose it, to lose your personality, to
become anonymous. You make yourself void” (Ager 4), Almásy expresses a similar
intention: “I wanted to erase my name and the place I had come from” (EP 148). It is
worthy to point out that the English patient’s narrative is brimming with such
comments on nation, which may seem lengthy but is definitely important because it
constructs a proper milieu for the serious discussion of nation-state. In fact, the
English patient’s verbal repetitions of deconstructing the concept of nation-state
works just like the way desert demarcates boundaries. The vastness of the desert
provides Almásy an infinite space to explore. He manages to gain anonymity as a
nomad in the desert, which to some extent savages him during the war before the
plane crash: “by the time the war arrived, after ten years in the desert, it was easy for
me to slip across borders, not to belong to anyone, to any nation” (EP 148). This
explains why Almásy advocates that he is eager to be nationless. Because at first
glance, it seems that the nationless-ness saves Almásy from the war. The assumed
negative requirement of Greek cosmopolitanism, i.e. the detachment from one’s place
and culture of origin in this case ironically plays a positive role in saving Almásy’s
life. That partially explains why during his dying days in Italy, despite being
geographically closer to his country of origin, Almásy puts strenuous effort in erasing
some aspects of his obtained European identity to save himself from military
investigation. As a hybrid of a variety of cultures, Almásy preaches the concept of
“citizen of the world”. Compared to the singular majority, he is plural since he is a
Hungary, who is fluent in English, working for Germany in Africa. It is indeed not
easy to pin down his nationality and other claims as he rejects a fixed identity. It is
common for a foreigner to feel displaced in a foreign place. But Almásy is at home
everywhere.
The detachment from nation-state is perhaps Almásy’s most strongest desire. In
fact, “detachment” is not adequate enough to describe his feeling in regards to nation:
53
“we were German, English, Hungarian, African- all of us insignificant to them.
Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations” (EP 147). His hatred for the
concept of nation comes from two sources. To begin with, it is his cosmopolitan
interaction with nationless tribes in the desert. During one of his explorations, he has
stumbled on the desert town of El Taj. There he walks through “stands of Italian
tomato sauce and other tinned food from Benghazi, calico from Egypt” (EP 147).
There the cultural plurality does deduce the confines of nationality. Almásy “received
this new world slowly, as if coming out of a drowning” (EP 147). It is the confluence
of cultures that excites Almásy. But as we have discussed in the first chapter, the
celebration of cultural confluence does not necessarily have to exclude nationalities.
Another important reason behind his hatred for nation is his reading of human history,
especially The Histories written by the Greek historian Herodotus.
To begin with, the reflection upon Herodotus’ comment on nation leads Almásy
to be doubtful of the concept of nation. The Histories was written in 440 BC. Born in
Halicarnassus in the Persian Empire, Herodotus traveled to the Black Sea, Egypt and
Babylon, and dwelled in Athens for a while before he retired to Italy. His book
records how people lived in those spatially and temporally distant cultures, covering
various aspects of life, such as jobs, marriages, etc. The book contains a mixed
recording of the ancient traditions, politics, geography and conflicts between ancient
cultures. To Almásy, Herodotus is seen as “one of those spare men of the desert who
travel from oasis to oasis, trading legends as if it is the exchange of seeds, consuming
everything without suspicion, piecing together a mirage” (EP 126). In Almásy’s eyes,
Herodotus is like a nomad wandering in the desert where he gathered stories instead
of being a historian. But more importantly, the war between Athens and Persia
consists of a major theme for The Histories. Herodotus is not a stranger to the impact
that wars can bring to human beings. By the same token, Ondaatje also records “how
people betray each other for the sake of nations” (EP 126) in The English Patient.
Another pivotal theme in The Histories is “how people fall in love” (EP 126). Almásy
tells a tragic and touching love story between him and Katharine. It is when Katharine
reads him “a specific story from Herodotus” (EP 247) that Almásy finds him falling
54
love with her. Their understandings of language differ. While Almásy “thought words
bent emotions like sticks in water” (EP 253), Katharine “had always wanted words,
she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape” (EP
253). The romantic subplot of Almásy and Katharine shows the power of love in
shaping and connecting people. Almásy is 15 years senior to Katharine Clifton. The
newly-wed follows her husband to the Libyan Desert to join Almásy’s team in the
desert adventure. Almásy and Katharine’s affair is morally wrong. But that is not the
ultimate reason why it grows into a tragedy. The British Intelligence believes that
Almásy kills Geoffrey Clifton over Katharine. Almásy becomes the enemy when he
begins the “affair with Katharine Clifton” (EP 270). Almásy’s understanding of
relationship deserves exploration: “He did not trust her last endearments to him
anymore. She was with him or against him. She was against him” (EP 183). Romantic
love is usually placed in the inner rings on the bullseye. Its failure to save the two
lovers enhances Ondaatje’s doubt in romantic love’s potential to save the world, for it
does not include people far away.
With the two reasons discussed above, we can understand why Almásy overtly
“advocates” rootless cosmopolitanism. His rant against nation can be interpreted as an
in-depth contemplation of the concept. Almásy recognizes that wars are highly
associated with, if not caused by, nation and nationality. Therefore, he wonders
whether peace can reign when the notion of nation is abandoned:
We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed,
bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters
we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for
all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such
cartography – to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like
the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories,
communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or
experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
(EP 277)
Drawing upon Ulrich Beck’s study of Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Almásy’s ideal of a nationless world
may seem reasonable, given that “the main lines of conflict during the Cold War were
openly political and derived their urgency from imperatives of national and
55
international security” (Beck 50). But to trust him easily would be a very dangerous
move. Because we are living in the post-Cold War period when “the lines of conflict
track major cultural antagonisms in which clashes of values between civilizations
feature prominently.” (Beck 50) After the Berlin Wall fell, we enter an era when
cultural and religious solidarity is seen as subordinate to strategic political and
military imperatives. The gradual intrusion on politics by culture has made the latter a
priority on the political agenda. We will fully explore this in the following section.

2.2 “International Bastards”

Almásy is certainly making a cosmopolitan argument when he refers to people

like Kip and him as “international bastards”, which he explains is the reason why the
Indian Sapper Kip gets along with him. But there is hidden danger with his tempting
term. The former desert explorer seems to have found a way of practicing the idea of
being a citizen of the world. He is open to different cultures. In terms of citizen of the
world, The English Patient raises within the novel a debate between two responses to
localism in the cosmopolitan context: one is detachment from one’ cultural roots, the
other being attached to them. The novel focuses on the disillusion of the first answer
and only slightly touches the second one. It is not until Anil’s Ghost that Ondaatje
fully addresses the second crucial response, answering questions in regards to how we
should situate ourselves in relation to our unique cultural roots when we are cultivated
to become cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitan conversations like this can be difficult
because “there are not guaranteed foundations” (Appiah 220) for participants engaged
in these conversations. To begin with, certain accepted values and beliefs in one place
may be deemed strange and even offensive elsewhere. Take Kip’s dressing and habits
for instance, he still wears Indian sarong in the British army, which is regarded as
weird in the West. As a result, cosmopolitan conversations in reality can be rather
uncomfortable and therefore short. However, this kind of cosmopolitan conversations

56
manage to flourish in novels, especially in great literature. Now let’s take our time
reflecting upon the burned man’s remark again:
Kip and I are both international bastards – born in one place and choosing to
live elsewhere. Fighting to get back to or get away from our homelands all our
lives. Though Kip doesn’t recognize that yet. That’s why we get on so well
together. (EP 188)
At first glance, Kip and Almásy are alike since they both leave their country of
origin to work and live in a far-away place and they both speak a foreign language
that is different from their mother tongue. Almásy intends to lure Hana to believe that
Kip is a perfect exemplification of rootless cosmopolitan, just like himself.
Despite the seemingly similar construction of cosmopolitan identity, Kip and
Almásy actually differ from each other to the very core. When Kip learns English, he
has to speak English to communicate with Europeans like Almásy. There is no vice
versa here. It is a one-way road, indicating a hierarchy in terms of cultures and
ethnicities. There is no “we” in Kip and Almásy to speak of in the first place. Almásy
may be seen as a citizen of the world. Kip is the only international bastard in the novel
when we consider its negative connotation. The reason why we deem Almásy’s
advocation of Greek cosmopolitanism as dangerous is because in the long course of
history imperial powers have been a destructing force when they try to homogenize
the rest of the world using cosmopolitanism as a deceptive disguise.
Kip squeezes himself into the Western society and experiences great difficulty
adapting to its culture. In fact, Kip is not even his real name. In his first bomb disposal
report in the UK, which is marked by some butter, the officer asks whether the stain is
“Kipper grease”. He does not understand the laughter surrounding the exclamation,
but since then the nickname has completely replaced his real name. But at the end of
the novel after his epiphany, he will switch back to his true name. We will come back
to this later. Whereas Almásy’s border-crossing should be more properly referred to as
privileges, Kip’s rootless position and border-crossing experience is a product of
political tension between the West and the East. He does not voluntarily choose to be
an “international bastard”. Rather, his choice is the passive result of being
homogenized, or Westernized by the invisible yet powerful force. As he confesses to

57
Almásy: “I grew up with traditions from my country, but later, more often, from your
country” (EP 283). When he is trained in the British military unit, “He was
accustomed to his invisibility.” (EP 200) His character alters in accordance with the
invisibility and anonymity as a stranger from the East. By overgeneralizing their
similarity, the burned man intends to hide the mechanism of imperialism. It is this
type of cosmopolitan thinking that deeply worries scholars who have voiced that
cosmopolitanism is imperialism in liberal disguise.
When Kip enrolls to work for Lord Suffolk, he is the only Indian candidate. He
gives up his mother tongue and picks up British English, muttering the words to
himself in his new English pronunciation “Wery dry. Very dry” (EP 199-200). A detail
that is worth noting while reading the novel is Kip’s physical appearance: “Now he
was a black figure, the background radicalizing the darkness of his skin and his khaki
uniform” (EP 193). As a racial minority living in the white-dominant England, Kip
holds a marginalized position. He is the only Indian among the applicants for Lord
Suffolk’s bomb squad. It occurs to him that “he would be admitted easily if it were
not for his race” (EP 200) because mathematics and mechanics are natural traits in his
motherland. Even after he achieves excellency in defusing bombs, he is still neglected.
“It was as much a result of being the anonymous member of another race, a part of the
invisible world” (EP 209).
Kip is trained to defuse bombs in the sapper unit under Lord Suffolk’s leadership.
Lord Suffolk acts as a mentor and friend to the young sapper. There is not enough
information according to which we can decide whether Lord Suffolk is cosmopolitan
in practice or in nature. But the rest of the officials greet Kip in a hostile way. The
middle-aged secretary in the library “watched him sternly” while Kip “smiled” (EP
200). When Kip “put his nose close to a volume”, he turns around and “caught the
woman’s eyes on him” (EP 200). This eye contact makes him “felt as guilty as if he
had put the book in his pocket” (EP 200). Although the colonized Kip volunteers to
fight for the colonizers, the British army, he is by no means regarded as one of them.
All Kip can do is exclaim to himself that “The English! They expect you to fight for
them but won’t talk to you” (EP 200). Kip is willing to go through the troublesome
58
experience because he is heavily influenced by Western ideology. As a matter of fact,
Kip in these last years of the war has “assumed English fathers, following their codes
like a dutiful son” (EP 229). Coming from India, a country by then still colonized by
the British, Kip risks his life for the country that rules over his people. Kip fights for
the British army because he is taught to believe in the Western values. His belief in
the western values leads him to reject the familial tradition: “The oldest son would go
into the army, the next brother would be a doctor, a brother after that would become a
businessman. An old tradition in his family” (EP 194).
Whereas back in his hometown his brother is put in jail for his anti-English
activities. Kip abandons his cultural roots to work for the British while his brother is
punished by the people who Kip works for. The irony here functions as a strong
evidence for imperialism in disguise as cosmopolitanism.
Although Kip has detached from his Indian customs and cultural roots to fit in
the British society, it is worthy to note that Kip has not completely abandoned all of
them. In the beginning, Caravaggio mistakes his habit of “always washing his hands”
for being “too fussy” (EP 81). Kip explains that: “I grew up in India, Uncle. You wash
your hands all the time. Before all meals. A habit. I was born in the Punjab” (EP 81).
After all, Kip has kept some Indian habits in the army. Through Kip’s disillusion of
the West, Ondaatje reveals the failure of Imperial universalism. But the reason why
Kip does his service for the British military is not solely because he is educated to
believe in the Western values. From his outrageous reaction to the bombing of
Japanese cities, we can speculate that he does this because he believes the West has
what it takes to save the whole humanity. He goes through racism and great difficulty
to serve for the British army because he believes the West has the solution to putting
an end to the war. Together with his clinging to Indian customs, he has the potential to
become what Appiah calls cosmopolitan patriot. And that will be discussed in detail in
the third chapter of this dissertation.
The bridge is a dominant image in the novel. Patell makes a brilliant
interpretation of Walt Whitman’s poem titled A Noiseless, Patient Spider. He points
out that Whitman’s speaker “makes an analogy between his soul and a spider starting
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the difficult process of building its web” (Patell 1). The web connects what is not
connected before the existence of the web, a function that bridges also do:
“Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, — seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d — till the ductile anchor hold…” (Patell 1)
During Kip’s service in the army, he travels across the war-torn Italy, where he “came
upon river after river of destroyed bridges” (EP 74). While wading through the rivers,
Kip thinks of the Queen of Sheba, who is A comforting figure to him. The Queen of
Sheba knows “the sacredness of bridges” (EP 74). The narrator of the novel reveals
that when the Queen of Sheba visited Jerusalem, she found out that the bridge over
the Siloam “was made from the wood of this sacred tree” (EP 74). But the bridges Kip
encounters are mainly destroyed ones, representing broken relationships between
peoples and nations. Apart from that, it symbolizes Ondaatje’s attempt to deconstruct
the established hierarchy between the East and the West.
Bridge can be seen as a connection between different cultures, confirming its
potential in increasing border-crossing interactions. However, in this novel the
metaphor of bridge is politically charged as well. In other words, there is a hierarchy
among involved connected parties. The Indian Sapper Kip observes bridges in the
war-torn zones that: “Every river they came to was bridgeless, as if its name had been
erased, as if the sky were starless, homes doorless” (EP 136). If the water goes under
bridge symbolizes the influence between different cultures, Westerners like Hana may
wish “for a river they could swim in” (EP 136). The water flows in one direction.
There is no “vice versa” to speak of. There is little chance that the other party would
flow to Kip who is on the other side of the bridge. The broken bridges turn borders
into boundaries where people can no longer pass peacefully. Rather, they either have
to defend for themselves or cross the river coercively, which means conflicts.
Hana gradually observes that there is a certain change going through Kip. A
change is happening inside Kip calling him to see the consequence of his mission and
the nature of his adopted British “father”. The four-member community lays the
groundwork for him to have the epiphany. He has turned from a boy to a “grown up”,
who is thus ready to join the rest of the community. She supposes the reason behind
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his change is that “in some way on those long nights of reading and listening…they
had prepared themselves for the young soldier” (EP 118). We will come back to the
transforming power of reading later.
Though having lived in the Western society for a long time, Kip still finds it
difficult to interact with other members of the community in the beginning of their
interaction, especially with Hana: “If he could walk across the room and touch her he
would be sane. But between them lay a treacherous and complex journey. It was a
very wide world” (EP 113). But a change of balance is indicated here. Ondaatje does
not name the burned explorer “the English patient” by chance. He implies that the
West is ill with its colonizing desire to homogenize the entire world. Kip is influenced
and shaped by the West, but he does not lose autonomy of self-awareness. As he
bravely snips the wire of Almásy’s hearing aid during his slumber.
The English patient feels insecure and that’s why he remains vigilant even
though he turns on his hearing aid when he hears a faint shudder in the building in the
deep of the night. The West that the burned man represents is on the decline. In the
meantime, the young Eastern sapper’s bold move represents his intention to challenge
the West, a figure he used to simply follow and obey. The villa is a place where the
weak can enter the strong:
He is halfway across the room, his hand sunk to the wrist in his open satchel
which still hangs off his shoulder. His walk silent. He turns and pauses beside
the bed. As the English patient completes one of his long exhalations he snips
the wire of his hearing aid with the cutters and drops them back into the
satchel. He turns and grins towards her. (EP 122)
Kip’s bold move reveals that he is gradually forming a self that recognizes the
homogenizing power of the West. His initiative of snipping the wire of the English
patient represents that he is gaining certain autonomy. Though it is indeed a small
step.
It is the bombing of the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki that completely
destroys his faith in the West, which explains his “extreme” reaction when he learns
about the overwhelming news on the radio:
If he closes his eyes he sees the streets of Asia full of fire. It rolls across cities
like a burst map, the hurricane of heat withering bodies as it meets them, the

61
 shadow of humans suddenly in the air. This tremor of Western wisdom. (EP
302)
The English Patient does not cater to its White readers. On the contrary, it
contains uncomfortable discussions like the confrontation between the sapper and the
burned man. When Kip learns about the atomic bombing of the Japanese cities, he
resorts to confronting Almásy in rage, who represents the West to Kip. The
displacement that Kip experiences as a stranger in the West is commonplace in most
post-colonial writing. But the psychological transformation that he goes through in the
cosmopolitan community is unique in Ondaatje’s fiction.
Kip’s brother has warned him not to trust Europeans. But Kip, like many other
Easterners, falls for “speeches and medals and … ceremonies” (EP 303). Kip has been
working day and night for the British military because he believes that the West
knows how to make the world better. His detachment from his own cultures and
country is met with the devastating result. Outraged, he could not bear to explain the
bombing to the eagerly inquiring Almásy. Therefore, he hands the radio to him so that
the latter can listen to “this tremor of Western wisdom” (EP 302). During the war, he
has skillfully defused so many bombs for his adopted British father. However, the two
nuclear bombs his adopted father’s ally throws to Japan are beyond his capability. Kip
never expects his belief in the West would be responsible for such horrific onslaught
of innocent civilians. At a certain point during the confrontation with Almásy, he
threatents to shoot the latter. He has this urge because in India, “when a father breaks
justice in two, you kill the father” (EP 303). We can see that the epiphany has ended
his detachment from his cultural roots in a rather drastic fashion.
Disillusioned, the Indian sapper puts an end to being the socially marginalized
and culturally other in the West. He would eventually return to his hometown at the
end. Before going back, Kip wages a war against the concept of “international
bastard”. He rejects his nickname Kip and retakes his Indian name: “His name is
Kirpal Singh and he does not know what he is doing here” (EP 305). His purposeful
mission loses every ounce of meaning. Kip’s epiphany reflects Ondaatje’s distrust of a
homogenized world reigned by the Western ideologies and values. The outrageous

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confrontation between Kip and Almásy officially declares Kip’s rejection of
“international bastard”, whose true nature is rootless cosmopolitanism in the disguise
of imperialism.

2.3 Reading as a Cosmopolitan Practice

Nearly every member of the villa has experienced a trauma of their own. Almásy
lives in constant agony because of the plane crash and the tragic death of his lover
Katharine; Hana has lost her baby and father during the war; Caravaggio has lost his
thumbs and his identity as a thief; Kip has lost his attachment to his country of origin.
When Caravaggio asks Hana whether she knows why the army does not want her
to stay in the villa with the English patient, she half-jokingly says “An embarrassing
marriage? My father complex?” (EP 89). Hana may not have a father complex, but the
relationship between the English patient and her does have something to do with
“father”:
“There was something about him she wanted to learn, grow into, and hide in,
where she could turn away from being an adult. There was some little waltz in
the way he spoke to her and the way he thought. She wanted to save him, this
nameless, almost faceless man who had been one of the two hundred or so
placed in her care during the invasion north.” (EP 54)
Hana regards the English patient as a shelter for her to “turn away from being an
adult” (EP 54). It is safe to say that, in addition to fulfilling her duty as a nurse, Hana
seeks consolation from the father figure of the English patient. In the four-people
community, he plays a vital role for every member. He is a purpose for Hana. Having
lost her beloved family because of the war, Hana desperately needs to find a purpose
in life. He is a purpose for Caravaggio as well, for the latter is obsessed to find out his
true identity to prove that he is not worthy of Hana’s hospitality. While for Kip,
Almásy is a teacher who shares with him wisdom and knowledge.
The four characters dwelling in the villa form an interdependent and correlative

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community. The members of the community all need to start the process of healing.
Anderson Benedict has innovatively defined nation as “an imagined political
community-- and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (Anderson 6).
Contrary to Anderson’s interpretation of the building of a nation, the community
formed by the four traumatized members is not built upon an imagined universal past.
They are gathered to get through the difficult present and strive for a better future.
Here Ondaatje’s message is clear. He encourages us to embrace our political and
cultural differences to form a community that does focus on whether we are of the
“same” political or cultural roots. One does not have to be the “same” as the majority
of the members of a community to have the access to be a member of this community.
Especially when we conceive the world as a community. Rather, the community can
be infinite in size to include every human being on the planet, including even animals
and plants. Ondaatje’s deep concern and inspirational proposal powerfully echo with
the proposal of building a Community of Shared Future.
Such examples are abundant in Ondaatje’s writing, which encourages
sympathetic engagement with otherness. From the sympathetic engagement that
transcends ethnic borders within a nation in In the Skin of a Lion to the sympathetic
engagement that transcends national borders in The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost,
Ondaatje’s novels emphasize a moral imperative to engage with people from different
nations and cultures. With his depiction of the unequal and symmetrical world,
Ondaatje directs his readers to realms of life that have been alien to them though
definitely linked to. By doing so, he instills the spirit of cosmopolitanism in them,
which help them embrace differences and bridge gaps.
The community is formed in the ruined villa. The villa with its garden is the
antithesis of the Biblical description of the Garden of Eden. Therefore, the villa
should probably not be seen as a utopia for many reasons. To begin with,
uncomfortable conversations over differences are common with the four members.
The reason why the four drastically different characters remain in the villa is because
of the cultivation of cosmopolitan empathy among them. Before we carry on with the
discussion, it is worthy to clarify the genealogy of empathy and cosmopolitan
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thinking. Sympathy refers to “the capacity to apprehend the pain, suffering, or signs
of negative emotions in man or animals and to respond to these with appropriate
negative feelings” (Wispe 441-447). Thus, sympathy is not just the apprehending of
suffering, but also the effort to put oneself in other’s situations. To feel sympathy is to
experience pain as a kind of communion, “an entering into and sharing the mind of
someone else” (Cooley 102).3
The Stoic cosmopolitanism promotes the idea that we should inhabit a realm that
goes beyond our own particular family, clan, and nation. But the detachment from our
cultural traits seems to cut us off from the earthly root that connect us with our
political and cultural selves. But cosmopolitan discourse is not limited to issues in
regards to cultural or ethical differences. We have yet to explore Adam Smith’s works
for the sake of cosmopolitanism, especially his well-known ideas of sympathy and
spectatorship to distant strangers. He argues that:
(a) that our natural “beneficence” tends to fade as its object becomes further
and further removed from the spectatorial center; and
(b) that our judgments of others become less and less reliable as a
justification for action or intervention. (Forman-Barzilai 5)
Adam’s thought would tremendously contribute to the cosmopolitan discussions
of empathy. Fonna Forman Barzi points out that Smith’s appropriation of the Stoic
idea of oikeiHsis is highly relevant to “contemporary debates about cosmopolitanism
in moral philosophy, political theory and international ethics” (Forman-Barzilai 7).
Adam relies heavily on the Greek concept OikeiHsis, which refers to the theory that
“human affection weakens as it radiates outward in degrees from the self”
(Forman-Barzilai 8). This concept suggests that the affection that humans have for
others would generate in a concentric way: the closer the recipient is to the self, the
stronger our affections would be. That is to say, our affection for people who are far

3
I have to reemphasize my standpoint on the two confusing terms: empathy and sympathy. As far

as I am concerned, empathy is more proper to be used in cosmopolitan discussion than sympathy

given that the first encourages “feel into” while the latter has a hierarchal connotation. But given
that there is a large literature of both empathy and sympathy, my quotation inevitably includes
both terms. For the sake of discussion, I keep them the way they are.

65
away strangers would matter very little to us. The word OikeiHsis derives from the
Greek root oikos. It refers to the life that occurs in households, a much smaller scale
compared with that of the polis. The circle model has become “something of a
commonplace in ethics discourse today” (Forman-Barzilai 9):
According to Stoic oikeiHsis, the bullseye represents the self, the innermost
ring represents one’s family (those literally within the oikos), the next ring
one’s friends, the next one’s neighbors, then one’s tribe or community, then
one’s country, and so on; and ultimately the outermost and largest ring
encompasses all of humanity. Surely, what determines the ordering of the
circles, who will be regarded as “close,” will vary with the kinship patterns in
any particular culture. But the process would seem to be a universal one for
the ancient Stoics: human affection and care are ordered spatially around the
self in a concentric pattern. (Forman-Barzilai 8)
Smith points out that it is because of oikeiHsis that the Stoics emphasized the
importance of cultivating “apathy” towards people nearer to the self. By doing so, one
can break down the circle structure and therefore become a cosmopolitan. As
contemporary scholar Martha Nussbaum suggests that we “should make all human
beings part of our community of dialogue and concern…and give the circle that
defines our humanity special attention and respect” (Forman-Barzilai 9).
But Adam rejects to accept the Stoic doctrine of cosmopolitanism. In essence,
Smith’s understanding of affection is Stoic in origin. The empirical fact of Stoic
oikeiHsis leads Smith to believe in the existence of affective bias. Smith’s argument
that human beings value more of the local than the global is grounded in “what he
believed were mankind’s very practical constraints in the realms of knowing and
assisting” (Forman-Barzilai 150). To conclude, Smith believes that geographical
proximity has an influence on ethical concern. This argument is exemplified by wars
in which soldiers commit crimes to ordinary people as illustrated in The English
Patient. “Killing is made easier as the distance between the perpetrators and their
victims increases” (Forman-Barzilai 151). Apart from that, because of the affection
for their nation, soldiers tend to view their victim as “the cause of death and not a
subject of it” (Forman-Barzilai 151). The distance rule is not confined to geographical
proximity. In many cases, ethnical, religious and political proximity within nations
would lead to more frequent and violent conflicts which are a wasteland of ethical
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concern. This explains why Ondaatje does not solely rely on the need for healing as
the way to construct a cosmopolitan community. His innovational suggestion is
reading novels.
Contemporary scholars have “interrogated the potential of reading literature for
the development of the sympathetic imagination and the increased capacity to feel for
others” (Hallemeier 88). There are debates over how sympathy provides a solid basis
for cosmopolitan practice. But Hallemeier argues that contemporary cosmopolitan
theory, by linking empathy with “the human”, “forecloses the very differences that it
purports to embrace” (Hallemeier 88).
It is essential to clarify the connection between empathy, cosmopolitanism, and
novel reading. Novel as a genre has “a continuous and comprehensive history of about
two thousand years” (Doody 1). However, it first came into being in the modern sense
(popularized) in the early 18th century. The invention of modern printing technology
gave a boost to the development of novel. The distribution of novels reaches far
corners of the world, with same books ending up in the hands of complete strangers.
The act of reading is associated with the cultivation of sympathy both politically and
morally. Smith argues that sympathy may not work in favor for the cultivation of
cosmopolitanism. Smith points out that to sympathize someone, one has to live in a
situation where the sympathized has the possibility to be the sympathizer as well.
Otherwise there is no mutuality involved to keep the momentum alive. Hardly would
he agree with the idea that we must feel “extreme misfortunes which we know
nothing about” (Forman-Barzilai 89). Therefore, it is safe to conclude that Smith
would be against the concept of “citizen of the world”. The English Patient, however,
is embedded in the age of globalization. The age of economic globalization and global
warming, as discussed in the first chapter, renders the world a much more
interconnected place than the one that Adam lived in. Apart from co-operations on a
global scale and interactions across cultures, the world faces an apocalyptic future that
concerns everyone. In fact, as early as the year 1795, Kant argues in a similar fashion
in the Perpetual Peace that:
“The growing prevalence of a (narrower or wider) community among the

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 peoples of the earth has now reached a point at which the violation of right at
any one place on the earth is felt in all place” (Kant 84).
Kant recommends the reading of literature works in favor of the cultivation of
cosmopolitanism. As he claims that “the kind of philosophical history he is
advocating amounts ultimately not to statistical analysis but to a ‘novel’”
(Forman-Barzilai 90). Kant believes that reading literature has the potential in
developing “the universal feeling of sympathy and the ability to engage universally in
very intimate communication” (Forman-Barzilai 90). When the writer composes a
novel, they would plant a common humanity in it. With the help of imagination, the
act of reading conjures up the pre-planted humanity. Thus, the writer’s understanding
of humanity is transmitted to whoever that reads the novel. It is the sympathetic
imagination that goes beyond the boundaries between different nations and cultures,
which explains why it has the potential to build a cosmopolitan community.
Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah are contemporary cosmopolitan
thinkers to have elaborated the connection between reading literature and
cosmopolitan sympathy. Although their directions part way on how the mechanism of
reading in the cultivation of cosmopolitan sympathy. Nussbaum argues that reading
literature enables people to extend sympathy beyond national borders while Appiah
deems that reading literature is itself a practice of cosmopolitan sympathy.
As exemplified in Ondaatje’s novel, Nussbaum and Appiah have put emphasis on
only a limited portion of cosmopolitan reading. The following section carries on the
study of the connection between literature reading and cosmopolitan empathy. It also
explores the intense intertextuality in The English Patient and its powerful ethical
impact on readers, a characteristic that highlights the novel. Intertextuality has always
been seen as a literary tradition and its discussion mainly focuses on its role in critical
methodology. Aaron Mauro has explored the intertextuality of The English Patient.
Drawing upon her study, my exploration of the intertextuality in the novel focuses on
its role in the cultivation of cosmopolitan empathy.
Reading has been an essential activity for Hana in the villa, which may because
her father Patrick has influenced her, whose hobby of reading we have briefly

68
discussed in the first chapters in terms of how it leads him into other’s life and stories.
Hana has been reading novels in particular, including Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, James
Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, and Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of
Parma. Reading to her “was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only
door out of her cell. They became half her world” (EP 7). When Almásy falls asleep
she would “ceremoniously pour herself a small beaker…and sip away further into
whatever book she was reading” (EP 7). In other cases, she would read to Almásy
when he is awake. Through the act of reading and listening of the same text, the two
members of the deserted Villa manage to touch and influence each other’s inner self.
It works because just like Hana, Almásy is also a hungry reader, or in his words: “I
have always had information like a sea in me. I am a person who if left alone in
someone’s home walks to the bookcase, pulls down a volume and inhales it” (EP 19).
There is an implied comparison between water and words in the novel. Almásy
mentions that he has seen rock engravings from a time when the desert people
“hunted water horses from reed boats” (EP 20) and paintings of swimmers in Wadi
Sura. However, centuries later, water becomes “the exile, carried back in cans and
flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth” (EP 20). When Hana reads to
Almásy, he is “swallowing her words like water” (EP 5). The trope of words as water
first implies a fluidity between text and reader. When Hana reads to Almásy, a
community of literature reading begins to come into being. The cultivation of reading
is exemplified by Kip. In the beginning, Kip “did not yet have a faith in books” (EP
117) when he arrives at the villa. But he has been present when Hana and Almásy read
together. When Hana reads to Almásy, Kip would be there listening to Hana’s reading.
Hana believes that this has prepared Kip for the transformation that he goes through.
Hence the community of literature is gradually growing as they read more novels
together:
A book, a map of knots, a fuze board, a room of four people in an abandoned
villa lit only by candlelight and now and then light from a storm, now and then
the possible light from an explosion. (EP 119)
Reading does not only bring them physically together. It enhances their
awareness of often ignored differences. Hana has a habit that associates her life with
69
the novels that she reads. Take The Charterhouse of Parma for instance, a Stendhal
fiction telling the story of an Italian nobleman in the Napoleonic era. One day when
Kip is walking under the shrapnel-torn cypresses, she is reminded of the novel: “Pliny
must have walked down a path like this, or Stendhal, because passages in The
Charterhouse of Parma had occurred in this part of the world too” (EP 90).
Hana’s life strangely resonates with her reading as well. The reading of the
novels sheds light on Hana’s observation of her surroundings and other people:
She imagines all of Asia through the gestures of this one man. The way he
lazily moves, his quiet civilisation. He speaks of warrior saints and she now
feels he is one, stern and visionary, pausing only in these rare times of sunlight
to be godless, informal, his head back again on the table so the sun can dry his
spread hair like grain in a fan-shaped straw basket. (EP 229)
Kip, who has been ignored to the majority of the West, is more than visible in the
eyes of Hana. To be precise, he is observed by Hana. In regards to Stendhal’s novel,
another intertextual analogue is that the Indian sapper serves in the British military
while Stendhal’s character the Italian nobelman Fabrizio fights for the French. This
strange analogue also exists between Almásy and Kathrarine, both being readers of
The Histories: “He would often open Herodotus for a clue to geography. But
Katharine had done that as a window to her life” (EP 247). The fact that their
approaches to the same book differ from each other exemplifies that reading is plural
in nature. It is destined to be polyphonic. As we approach a text from different
perspectives, we are going to generate different meanings concerning the book. The
celebration of similarity and difference is another factor that makes reading literature
a cosmopolitan practice. The two-way movement between text and life is fundamental
to the construction of a literary community.
There is a parallel between the act of reading and the condition of the Villa.
Resembling the wounded villa, The Histories that Almásy has been carrying through
his exploration in the desert is also structurally wounded. Almásy adds many of his
own writings, maps and notes to the book. Reading Almásy’s copy, Hana comes to
realize that his reading of the book is a re-inventing process where he innovatively
breaks “the sovereignty of the self-contained book into an international,

70
interdiscursive, and intertextual field of movement” (Mauro 72).
Echoing what Almásy does when reading The Histories, Hana actively conducts
an interactive connection with the books that she reads. Take The Last of the
Mohicans for instance, she adds the following words to the book:
She opens The Last of the Mohicans to the blank page at the back and
begins to write in it.
There is a man named Caravaggio, a friend of my father’s. I have always
loved him. He is older than I am, about forty-five, I think. He is in a time of
darkness, has no confidence. For some reason I am cared for by this friend of
my father. (EP 65)
Hana weaves her personal past into the novel she is reading. What Caravaggio
means to her reminds her of what Nathaniel Bumppo (Hawk-eye) means to the Munro
sisters in the Last of the Mohicans. Her writing can be seen as an intertextual
inscription. The “self” encounters the other while the private blends with the public.
Having lost her father in the war, Hana is mentally traumatized. But she decides not to
escape the war-ridden country. On the contrary, she is determined to stay even though
she is well aware of the impending danger of staying in the Villa.
Hana knows that reading could be dangerous. The way she reads and interprets a
novel is not a pleasure-seeking experience. She is well aware of the fact that by
reading she is about to learn about people’s lives:
She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been
immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her
body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a
heaviness caused by unremembered dreams. (EP 13)
It is reasonable of Hana to take care the English patient since she is a nurse. But
given that Hana chooses to stay with the patient even when she is aware of the
possible dangers, there must be other reasons behind her motivation. Here we suggest
that her habit of novel reading has cultivated a cosmopolitan empathy that is explains
her genuine hospitality. Reading novels cultivates in the reader an understanding of
the lives of others. To do so, we have to learn to show interest in their lives. Hana
accepts the sapper into the community “as if out of this fiction. As if the pages of
Kipling had been rubbed in the night like a magic lamp” (EP 100). Reading Kim
allows Hana to perceive Kip from a perspective that differs from that of certain

71
Westerners, to whom, Kip is only “the anonymous member of another race, a part of
the invisible world” (EP 209). The reading that Ondaatje represents in the novel is a
“cosmopolitan reading”, as Patell suggests:
Above all, a cosmopolitan reading practice requires us to cultivate
cosmopolitan irony by attuning ourselves constantly to the interplay of
sameness and difference, of comfort and discomfort, in the acts of writing,
reading, and performing texts. My best advice for those who wish to pursue a
cosmopolitan reading practice is this: when you find a text familiar and
comforting, look for ways, using the frames of reference I’ve outlined earlier,
to make it feel strange, unfamiliar, and different. Produce discomfort in
yourself. And when a text makes you uncomfortable, use the frames to find
aspects of sameness and to make yourself comfortable with its difference. Be
at home with all the texts you encounter—and with none of them. (Patell 149)
Hana perfectly embodies the cultivating power of reading. Cosmopolitan reading
requires us to read novel as a social milieu of imagined communities where
conversations over differences are not only possible but are praised. Cosmopolitan
reading, like every other cosmopolitan practice, invites the reader to interrogations
and conversations where their most essential values and beliefs could be at stake.
There are different approaches to the text’s fragmented structure. To begin with,
there is the post-modern methodology which associates the fragmentation with the
nature of postmodernist understanding of history. There is another approach that
focuses on its practical function that “The English Patient fragments its own narrative
to highlight the impact of apocalyptic disaster and offer a concrete example of the
fracturing of linear narratives” (Goldman 60).
We can also read its fragmented narrative from the perspective of enhancing our
awareness of difference. Instead of composing a chronological linear story, Ondaatje
constructs the story, or stories to be exact, in his cubist way. Readers have to alter
their reading habits to piece together fragments of non-sequential narratives and make
sense of all the sub-plots while understanding their interconnectedness. With the
skillfully shifts between personal pasts of four main characters dwelling in the same
villa, Ondaatje implants his belief in co-existence of differences. The English Patient
to a certain extent resembles the books that Hana reads to Almásy. They all have
“gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if

72
lotus had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had
fallen away from a mural at night” (EP 7). Fragmented narrative requires extra
concentration and devotion from readers. It is undoubtedly a very demanding reading
experience. But it can be rewarding as well when readers explore the story with
narrative fragments. Ondaatje intends to blend the four entirely different narratives so
that they co-exist harmoniously. A de-centered structure of narrative exemplifies his
hope for a community where equality could reign. It is because of the fragmented
form, together with the highly cosmopolitan content, that The English Patient and
Ondaatje’s other novels should be termed as cosmopolitan fictions.
To conclude, this chapter first expounds a rootless cosmopolitanism that opens
up a discussion of nationalism and imperialism. Then it studies the rootless
cosmopolitanism and Ondaatje’s own critique of this structure of thought.
Approaching a literary text from different standpoints, we open up multiple ways
to interpret it. Ondaatje is expected to write certain kinds of novels that would
normally be written by writers of minority origin. But he has been consistent in
breaking these expectations in his career. The thematic and geographical range of The
English Patient, together with his cubist narrative and poetic prose, has proved to be
powerful in cultivating a cosmopolitan reading. It is Ondaatje’s hope that reading
literature could have the potential to connect every individual living in the world.
Therefore, differences can be recognized, gaps can be bridged and an affective
community of a shared future can be formed.

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Chapter Three The Rooted Cosmopolitanism in Anil’s Ghost

Anil’s Ghost is not Ondaatje’s first book to address his country of origin. It is his
fictionalized memoir, Running in the Family (1993). But the memoir has been
criticized for its lack of interest in the turbulent political climate in Sri Lanka. The
publication of Anil’s Ghost finally meets the long expectation as it plunges deep into
the Sri Lankan civil war. But it has still received unfavorable reviews for not engaging
directly in certain major issues concerning the war. Tom LeClair argues that
Ondaatje’s “apolitical gaze seems irresponsible” (LeClair 31). Jon Kertzer says that
although the novel chooses the civil war as its topic, it “is not a political novel in the
traditional sense: it offers little political analysis and foresees no political solutions”
(Kertzer 131). Paul Gray highlights the “neutrality of Ondaatje’s language” and points
out that Ondaatje avoids clarifying “demarcations between opposing forces, allies and
enemies” (Gray 75). It’s not hard to tell that these critics scathe Anil’s Ghost for being
apolitical because Ondaatje has not shown his opinions about questions like who
should be responsible for the war.
It is true that the novel is not a conventional political novel where political
debates would prevail. In fact, there is only a brief mentioning of the three warring
juntas in the novel. Instead, Ondaatje patiently and skillfully depicts the suffering and
life of individuals during the Sri Lanka civil war. This chapter argues that the novel
does deal with the political crisis. But it is done through complicated and dynamic
relations between Anil and her fellow countrymen during the human rights
investigation carried out on the island. Ondaatje holds a doubtful view towards a
purely political solution. What he promotes in Anil’s Ghost is a cosmopolitan stance
which deals with a more urgent project: to piece together the broken country and heal
its people. The novel engages in a discussion over one of the most contested topics
that is raised in the wake of globalization: what does it mean to be a cosmopolitan in
terms of finding a balance between the local and the global?

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 Before we scrutinize the novel, it is of great importance and necessity to clarify
the historical background of the novel. Otherwise it would be difficult for us to fully
comprehend it. How and when did the opposing forces come into being in the first
place? Why does it seem impossible to put an end to the violence? What lies at the
heart of the intolerable differences between peoples? These questions are essential for
us to make sense of Anil’s Ghost. There is little doubt a study of this typical case shall
shed light on other similar cases. The following section offers a brief but to-the-point
research on the genealogy Sri Lanka’s ethnicities.
The civil war has turned Sri Lanka into a Colosseum. However, the two
gladiators taking each other by the throat were originally not enemies. Sri Lanka
gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1948. Since then, it has
witnessed the deteriorating tension between two powers: dominating Sinhala
nationalism and rising Tamil nationalism. The hostility between two political forces
went back before Sri Lanka gained its independence. It is largely a colonial solution
that was employed for the sake of management.
Ironically though, the making of Sinhala and Tamil on the island has not been a
static process. Rather, it has been a dynamic one. During the colonial years, the
criterion of membership was mainly religious.
The tension between two peoples could find its historical roots in the “age of
mature colonialism” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when they were
separated into distinct races. The British colonists were allowing more Sri Lankan
seats in the colonial government. Therefore, each people was to be represented by a
person of the same race. This associates the possibility of power with racial criteria:
Yet when we look at the shorter historical term at least, we find that during the
colonial period violent clashes erupted between groups defining themselves in
terms of religious affiliation but not between groups defining themselves as
Sinhala and Tamil. (Spencer 19)
Sinhala people believe that they are the first “civilized” settlers on the island.
They claim that their ancestors, north Indian Aryan, arrived on the shores on the day
of the Buddha’s death. But the Sinhala were not converted to Buddhism until the third
century BC. A Sinhala-Buddhist civilization reigned the island during the third

75
century BC to the ninth century AD. The kingdom had been under attack from South
Indian Tamil-speaking Hindus. Then the Tamil intruders established their own
communities in Sri Lanka. The Tamil history of Sri Lanka unsurprisingly differs from
that of Sinhala in many aspects. For instance, Satchi Ponnambalam, a leading Sri
Lankan Tamil lawyer and judge, argues that “the Sinhala were originally Tamils who
converted to Buddhism and adopted Sinhala” (Spencer 20).
It is worth noting that despite the intense conflicts between the Sinhala and Tamil
during the civil war, “for long periods of time groups which would now be
characterized in terms of the Sinhala-Tamil divide lived more or less at peace with
one another” (Spencer 24). The differences of language and religion were not
invented around the civil war. The question is what has changed the peaceful status
quo?
Around 19th century, Sri Lanka first served as a strategic strongpoint for the
British. Then its growing trade and commerce, especially in coffee and tea plantations,
attracted large numbers of south Indian Tamil laborers. The British government
recognized that they were in a complicated situation with people speaking different
languages, believing in different religions.
When describing the ethnic context to conflict in Sri Lanka, a rather static
concept of identity is often used to depict the conflict as a confrontation between
natural ethnic groups. However, by a brief analysis of the history of Sri Lanka, we can
challenge the framing of confrontation as a perpetual hostility between the Sinhalese
and the Tamil.
The Sri Lankan census of 1981 (the most recent census to cover the entire
island) divided the population into Sinhalese (74 per cent), Sri Lankan Tamils
(12.7 per cent), Indian Tamils (5.5 per cent), Sri Lankan Moors (7 per cent),
Burghers (0.3 per cent), Malays (0.3 per cent) and others (0.2 per cent).
(Orjuela 79)
Benedict Anderson argues that census-taking is one way for the government to
organize the diverse populations in its territory. It is also a tool through which the
nation-state is imagined (Anderson). Every individual is thus linked to certain traits
that belong exclusively to their ethnic group. These traits include a variety of aspects,

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such as: language, tradition, religion, locality, a shared history and culture, etc. A brief
look at the process of ethnic boundary-creation in Sri Lanka can reveal its ambiguity
and arbitrariness, which explains why Ondaatje remains tacit on this issue.

3.1 Cosmofeminism

After fifteen years living outside her country of origin Sri Lanka, forensic
anthropologist Anil Tissera comes back to her motherland. She is sent by the United
Nations Human Rights Center on a mission to investigate political murders on the
turbulent island. The local government appoints Sarath Disyasena to “assist” Anil.
The novel focuses on the investigation that Anil and Sarath carry out. Anil is
determined to find out the truth behind a skeleton which is found in a government
secured burial site. The two of them embark on an extremely strenuous and dangerous
mission to reveal the skeleton’s true identity. Anil suspects that the Sri Lankan
government is responsible for the death of the victim. As the mission continues, Anil
encounters many unexpected figures who have all lost their family members in the
war: the traumatized miner and artificer Ananda Udugama, whose wife has
presumably been murdered; Sarath’s teacher epigraphist Palipana, whose brother has
been killed in the presence of his daughter. Anil later finds out that Sarath’s wife has
committed suicide, which severely hunts both Sarath and his younger brother Gamini.
Eventually with hard evidence, the two conclude that the government is indeed guilty
of the death of victim, whom they name “Sailor”. However, a dramatic scene happens
when Anil contacts a Sri Lankan official named Dr. Perera, who sides with the
government. Sarath makes a moral decision as he saves Anil at the cost of his own life.
It is not clear whether Anil leaves the country with the skeleton or stays in Sri Lanka
to continue her fight against the government. Throughout the novel, the personal
history of all the characters gradually unfolds in the form of flashback. They are all
victims of traumatic experiences. Apart from the aforementioned three characters,

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Anil has also lost both her parents in a car accident. In the meantime, her best friend is
suffering from a severe disease. The novel is filled with traumatic and violent images:
a suicide bombing on the streets of the capital; on her way to work, Ananda’s wife
eyes human heads hanging on spikes, just to name a few. And the most touching and
perhaps unbearable scene happens when Gamini finds a tortured body to be his
brother at the Dean Street Hospital. Sarath is only one of the continuing string of dead
bodies which come down “the four main rivers of the country” (AG 212).
At first glance, Anil would be automatically categorized as a diaspora. A typical
character to which we can apply many post-colonial concepts: such as displacement,
the metaphor of nomad, etc. Although this study draws upon post-colonial identity
theories, it argues that post-colonial theories fall short in fully exploring the novel
because it transcends the binary opposites with its cosmopolitan vision. From the very
early pages, Anil is depicted as a nomadic person who travels around the world on
different human rights missions: from war-torn Guatemala to the Congo and back to
Sri Lanka. Anil returns to Sri Lanka as a foreigner, a Westerner with “a British
passport” (AG 16). She is not forced to leave Sri Lanka as a refugee. At the age of 18,
she chose to study and live in the West. Years of medical school and field work
around the world enable her to come to identify with the foreignness abroad:
In her years abroad, during her European and North American education, Anil
had courted foreignness, was at ease whether on the Bakerloo line or the
highways of Santa Fe. She felt completed abroad. Even now her brain held the
area codes of Denver and Portland. (AG 54).
Apart from that, the team does all kinds of researches on the skeleton in the
laboratory on the Oronsay, an old passenger liner that is now permanently berthed in
an abandoned quay:
The Oronsay, a passenger liner in the old days of the Orient Line, had been
gutted of all valuable machinery and luxury furnishings. It had once travelled
between Asia and England—from Colombo to Port Said, sliding through the
narrow-gauge waters of the Suez Canal and journeying on to Tilbury Docks.
By the 1970s it made just local trips. (AG 18)
Oronsay is of British descent whereas Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon, was a
British Crown colony between 1802 and 1948. The liner had witnessed the colonial
history of the island and its later independence. Thus, the transformation from global
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routes to local trips is a metaphor for the de-colonization of Sri Lanka, both politically
and culturally.
One particularity about Anil is that her current name is actually “bought” from
her brother, which was originally his unused second name. She refuses to respond to
her initial name at home and at school. Eventually the brother agrees to give her the
name under the condition that she pays “one hundred saved rupees, a pen set he had
been eyeing for some time, a tin of fifty Gold Leaf cigarettes she had found, and a
sexual favor he had demanded in the last hours of the impasse” (AG 68). Anil is
actually a male name. Anil’s identity construction at the very beginning comes at a
price, which indicates incest. But Anil deems the sacrifice worthwhile:
Later when she recalled her childhood, it was the hunger of not having that
name and the joy of getting it that she remembered most. Everything about the
name pleased her, its slim, stripped-down quality, its feminine air, even though
it was considered a male name. Twenty years later she felt the same about it.
She’d hunted down the desired name like a specific lover she had seen and
wanted, tempted by nothing else along the way. (AG 68)
Naming is a one of the first steps to construct an identity. The name exemplifies
her rejection of an identity that is planned by the patriarchal society. Educated and
trained to be a forensic pathologist for the United Nations, Anil is the antithesis of
Spivak’s conceptualization of “subaltern woman”. Her voice obviously has the
potential to be heard in a patriarchal field. Anil’s choices mirror her urge to break
through the dominant and stereotyped arrangement for the “subaltern woman”. It is
safe to say that her construction of self is a conscious process. By navigating through
the boundaries of gender, she fights against the injustice caused by sexual difference.
Anil has a brief and unsuccessful marriage with a Sri Lankan medical student in
the UK. Their marital bliss is cut short by her father-in-law’s visit from Sri Lanka.
The father-in-law is outraged when he finds out that Anil’s ambition of “having a
full-time career, keeping her own name” (AG 143). He is “annoyed at her talking
back.” (AG 143) The unconventional identity Anil is then building irritates and to
some extent intimidates him. Ever since this unpleasant exchange, their marriage
worsens when Anil eventually “plotted her departure for the end of term to avoid the
harassment he was fully capable of” (AG 145). This symbolizes Anil’s departure from
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her original attachment to her country of origin, its culture and language as well. In
fact, after she left Sri Lanka at eighteen, “her only real connection was the new sarong
her parents sent her every Christmas (which she dutifully wore), and news clippings
of swim meets” (AG 10). When she returns to Sri Lanka, she could barely speak
Sinhala anymore. Anil’s conversation with Dr. Perera, a senior medical officer can
illustrate Anil’s status quo upon arrival in Colombo.
“Your dress is Western, I see.’
‘It’s a habit.’
‘You’re the swimmer, no?’
She walked away, nodding exaggeratedly.” (AG 26)
Anil has been an exceptional swimmer, having won a two-mile swim race at
sixteen in Sri Lanka, where swimming is highly valued. Anil’s repugnant reaction
towards something that was once cherished by her and her family reflects her
detachment from her cultural roots after she “courted foreignness” in the West.
Nomadic elites like Anil are usually slandered as rootless cosmopolitans. But the
cosmopolitanism Ondaatje promotes in Anil’s Ghost is what Appiah terms as a rooted
cosmopolitanism or “a cosmopolitan patriotism”. Anil is a typical Greek cosmopolitan
in the beginning. Her detachment from Sri Lanka is so complete that she is no longer
regarded as one of them. Upon arrival, she is engaged in a forced and unpleasant
conversation with a young Sri Lankan official:
“How long has it been? You were born here, no?’
‘Fifteen years.’
‘You still speak Sinhala?’
‘A little. Look, do you mind if I don’t talk in the car on the way into
Colombo—I’m jet-lagged. I just want to look. Maybe drink some toddy before
it gets too late. Is Gabriel’s Saloon still there for head massages?”
…The return of the prodigal.” (AG 9)
Although Anil is regarded as a prodigal in her country of origin, she still care
about people that have been close to her in Sri Lanka. On her first weekend returning
Sri Lanka, Anil visits her childhood Tamil nanny Lalitha, now an aged woman.
Though Anil can no longer communicate with Lalitha since there is “a lost language
between them” (AG 22), the two embrace each other with genuine love. However,
Lalitha’s granddaughter treats her in a rather hostile way. She “barely looked at Anil

80
after the first shaking of hands, was speaking loudly.” (AG 23) Her hostility is caused
by the fact that Anil is ethnically Sinhalese and culturally Western. Lalitha speaks to
her granddaughter in Tamil, and she “seemed embarrassed to be talking in Tamil and
was whispering” (AG 23). Maya Jaggi thus comments on Anil’s visit that there is a
“sense in the novel of fratricide, of a family at war” (Jaggi 7). The complicated
tension between Anil and the two hosts is a miniature version of the crisis looming
large in the country. It demonstrates the politically charged ethical confrontation
between Sinhalese and Tamil. Anil’s inability to speak Sinhala not only hinders her
communication with the local but rids her citizenship as a Sri Lankan as well. Anil
becomes an outsider and an unwelcome foreigner. Gillian Roberts points out that
“Lalitha’s granddaughter speaks to Anil in English: apparently acting hospitably”
(Roberts 966). However, according to a few details it is more accurate to say that she
is hostile to Anil. When Lalitha asks her to take a picture of the two, she “took one
picture before Anil was quite ready” (AG 23), claiming one is enough. She answers
Anil’s questions without even letting Anil finishing her sentence:
“Your brother, what does he—’
‘He’s quite a famous pop singer!’
‘And you work in the camps . . .’
‘Four years now.” (AG 24)
The hostility that Sri Lankans show to Anil comes from their distrust of the West.
As Gamini ironically points out when they meet:
‘‘American movies, English books—remember how they all end?’’ Gamini
asked that night. ‘‘The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves.
That’s it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at
Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look through at the
clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He’s going
home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That’s enough reality for the West.
It’s probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political
writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.’’ (AG 285-86)
From the war doctor we can see that they have doubts concerning Anil’s
intention in Sri Lanka. But more importantly, the irony of Gamini’s remark enables
people to question the role that West human rights organizations play in the “Third
World”. Their often dominative and preconceived position hinders the possibility of
conversation where opposing groups could negotiate. The common situation is that
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these organizations would have a clear demarcation of the right and the wrong. And
their task is to help the good to wage a war against the evil. Ondaatje is cautious so he
chooses not to side with any force in Sri Lanka. But we can understand why Ondaatje
chooses to be comparatively silent on this issue. It is to some extent encouraging
Westerners to reflect upon the “Third World” information resources they feed on. For
one thing, the complicacy is beyond what these resources are capable of depicting and
willing to depict. More importantly, Ondaatje wants to shift our attention to the war at
the micro level where individuals suffer tremendously, be it physical or psychological.
It is worthy to note that Anil is not seen as one of that Westerners either. Her Western
lover Cullis thus comments her: “You are a complete stranger to me. Colombo. Is the
place languid?” (AG 35) The problem of solidarity that Anil faces renders Anil the
perfect character to bridge the gaps between the West and the East.
When Anil and Sarath commence their investigation of the skeleton, what they
do first is to name the skeleton. Anil believes that to give the skeleton a name “would
name the rest” (AG 56). The nameless Sailor the skeleton represents a group of
victims who remain unknown in the civil war. Ondaatje’s delicately complex
characters incorporate the clash displayed in cultural and ideological differences. As a
multivalent mix of the West and the East, Anil enters a new perspective that is larger
and more in-depth than that of the traditional one.
During the early stages of the investigation, there is an obvious disparity between
Anil and Sarath that generates both discomfort and conflicts. Sarath talks about a
Chinese village where he excavated the tomb of an ancient ruler with his team. 20
female musicians have been found in the tomb, which, as the team suggests, were
buried to accompany the ruler so that he could listen to music even in his afterlife.
Anil condemns the ridicule and cruelty of the ritual:
“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. You
boys are sentimental. Death and glory.” (AG 261)
Anil is quick and cynical with her comment. But Sarath’s interpretation of the
ritual is from an entirely different perspective:
Music was not entertainment, it was a link with ancestors who had led us here,

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 it was a moral and spiritual force. The experience of breaking through barriers
of slate, wood, water, to discover a buried women’s orchestra had a similar
mystical logic to it, do you understand? You must understand their state of
acceptance somehow of such a death. The way the terrorists in our time can be
made to believe they are eternal if they die for the cause of their ruler. (AG
261)
Sarath’s interpretation is more associated with the particular cultural roots. The
point is not about who makes a stronger case here. Rather, it is the exchange of
different opinions that would eventually help bridge the gaps between the two
opposing characters. Anil and Sarath remain a team for the investigation despite their
huge ideological and methodological differences. Since they are not in a position to
use advanced equipment that is only available in the capital or the West, they find it
impossible to continue their investigation of the skeleton. Palipana enlightens them to
search for a local artist named Ananda to try to reconstruct the body using a
traditional method. Ananda plays a vital role in the tradition of Nētra Mangala where
“a special artist is needed to paint eyes on a holy figure” (AG 97). In the beginning,
Anil remains rather doubtful about this method and she refers to Ananda as
“noncertified person”. To reconstruct the skeleton, Ananda goes deep into the
assumed village and observes its people and livelihood:
He chatted with anyone who sat near him, shared his few cigarettes and
watched the village move around him, with its distinct behaviour, its local
body postures and facial characteristics. He wanted to discover what the
people drank here, whether there was a specific diet that would puff up cheeks
more than usual, whether lips would be fuller than in Batticaloa. Also the
varieties of hairstyle, the quality of eyesight. (AG 166)
Ananda’s research is in fact a combination of Anil’s professional positivism and
Sarath’s emphasis on character, nuance and mood.
Anil is at ease with herself when she works with skeletons. The tranquil
atmosphere and the “human-less” strangers in the laboratory soothe her. Her traumatic
past is associated with human therefore these human-less objects create an emotion
detox for her. Spaces like laboratory serve as a shield for Anil where she does not
have to interact with other human beings. As aforementioned, Anil acts rationally
during the investigation, especially in the beginning. However, certain events break
Anil’s rational logic. And she starts to vent out the pinned down affects. In the novel,
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her repressed Other is expressed through interaction with others. Ondaatje employs
the water image as the catalyst for acknowledging the Other as Anil pours water from
a well over her body:
Several more times she jerked the full bucket up out of the well and poured
water over herself. She felt manically awake, shivering, she wanted to talk.
She left the clothes by the well and walked to her room and tried to disappear
into sleep. She could feel the coldness of the well water reaching her in her
exhaustion, knew it had entered her bones. (AG 200)
The darkness of the well represents one’s past. Anil’s ritualistic pouring
symbolizes her willingness to embrace her past. The awakening past releases her
long-repressed affect.
Another character that finally embraces his past is Gamini. The war doctor has
lived under the shadow of his brother Sarath ever since childhood. He has waged a
war within himself against Sarath. His mother’s absence has injured Gamini
psychologically, which explains his habit of keeping his affects to himself. His
inability to express his emotions has deteriorated when he secretly falls into love with
Sarath’s wife Ravina. Unable to survive the traumatic war of Sri Lanka, Ravina
commits suicide. This is Gamini’s last straw. He buries his emotions as he buries
himself in the never-ending work at the hospital. To sustain the frenzy workload, he
starts taking pills so that he can be awake for medical service. The irony is that
Gamini the sympathetic care giver is in desperate need for care himself.
The hostile attitude of Gamini towards his brother dies out when he lastly
acknowledges his love for his deceased brother. Ondaatje shows readers how people,
even those opposing figures, are connected with each other and have the power and
possibility to love each other.
“Foreigners must confront a ghost from the past that remains hidden in a secret
part of themselves” (Guberman and Kristeva 4). The novel offers an examination of a
self in the process of navigating through multiple and sometimes opposing sets of
claims. As Stuart Hall argues, “identity is a process, identity is split. Identity is not a
fixed point but an ambivalent point” (Hall 16), Anil’s cosmopolitan identity undergoes
a dynamic and evolving process during the investigation. Ondaatje strives to create a

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perspective that presents the construction of identity in working progress across
cultural and political boundaries. The novel embodies a cosmopolitan practice that
goes beyond the process of acculturation in terms of the theme of gender and other
claims.

3.2 Doctor the Sweet Touch from the World

By the time Anil’s Ghost was published (2000), the Sri Lankan Civil War was
nine years away from its ending. Thousands of people would lose their lives in that
prolonged nine years.
But here it was a more complicated world morally. The streets were still
streets, the citizens remained citizens. They shopped, changed jobs, laughed.
Yet the darkest Greek tragedies were innocent compared with what was
happening here. Heads on stakes. Skeletons dug out of a cocoa pit in Matale.
At university Anil had translated lines from Archilochus—In the hospitality of
war we left them their dead to remember us by. But here there was no such
gesture to the families of the dead, not even the information of who the enemy
was.” (AG 11)
Ondaatje has not shown too much intention in putting an end to the violence
and injustice in his novel. Sri Lankans are starting to doubt whether “the reason for
war was war” (AG 43). They desperately need healing rather than blaming who is
responsible for the war. As a writer, Ondaatje can be liberal with the story, which
means he offering a subjective reading of the civil war or an objective documentary
recreating the bloodbath happening on a daily basis in Sri Lanka. Anil’s Ghost depicts
the horror of day-to-day life in Sri Lanka during the civil war in a straightforward way.
In the meantime, the novel calls out for the immediate healing process. Though
Ondaatje takes a dim view of the worsening political situation in Sri Lanka, he has not
given up on the war-ridden island. Ondaatje intends to start the healing process in the
novel, which he deems is the most practical and essential for innocent and traumatized
civilians on that island. Ondaatje once said:
I hope Anil’s Ghost is seen as a communal book, in a time when there seems

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 to be little change of a solution to acts of violence, on all sides. Pacifism,
reconciliation, forgiveness are easily mocked and dismissed words. But only
those principles will save us. (qtd. McGonegal 86)
In the war-ridden Sri Lanka, where massacre, assassinations and bombings occur
every day, doctors are among the first to shoulder the ethical responsibility for those
injured: “the hand of a surgeon opposed to the hand of a torturer” (AG 118). With a
large proportion of the novel dedicated to doctors and hospitals, we can see that
Ondaatje concerns primarily about the healing in the novel. He understands that it
would be extremely difficult for him to prescribe a remedy to settle the political chaos
in Sri Lanka. Ondaatje takes up the mission of instilling justice into the situation,
encouraging people to steer away from violence. The origin of the chaotic situation in
Sri Lanka, is not the novel’s concern. The writer comprehends the intricacy of the
situation. He understands that the top priority is to deal with the consequences of the
situation. As aforementioned, the novel paints the everyday life of people living under
the impact of the brutal civil war. Extreme nationalism has bred hatred among
individuals of different ethnicities in the same country. Ondaatje’s effort in switching
their perspective towards difference is both beneficial and urgent.
Anil has been witnessing the brutality of the civil war ever since she lands on the
island. In a forensics lesson, she asks some local students why the fingers of a
murdered man remained intact when his arms were broken, since “Your hands go up
to protect yourself. Usually the fingers get damaged” (AG 14). A student quietly
mentions that “maybe he was praying” (AG 14). Their calm and familiarity shocks
Anil to the core because it reveals that the student is accustomed to civilians being
killed, even during their religious events. While according to forensics, the second
body was most likely to have been thrown out of a helicopter from a great height
before hitting the water with its face down.
The investigation is carried out in a thickening horrific atmosphere. The novel is
full of horrifying images caused by the brutal civil war. On their way to Colombo,
Anil and Sarath notice a truck driver named Gunesena who is crucified to the tarmac.
The scene that depicts Ananda’s wife’s incident is even more terrible. As a school
teacher, she heads to the village school as usual via a bridge. Except this time, the
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bridge is lined with human heads on stakes. She has been abducted and never seen
again.
While Anil’s visit to Lalitha introduces us to the conflict that is tearing apart Sri
Lanka, her changing relationship with Sarath can be seen as Ondaatje’s depiction of
how to turn hostility into hospitality. That these binaries are so interchangeable is
precisely Ondaatje’s point.
In the beginning, Anil and Sarath do not get along with each other. Sarath is
suspicious of Anil’s intention, feeling that she works for the human rights
organization out of “false empathy and blame” (AG 44). The initial doubt turns into
distrust because Anil’s sees “Sri Lanka with a long-distance gaze” (AG 11).
Anil’s relationship with Ananda also goes through a transformation. In the
beginning, they barely talk since they do not speak the same language. Ananda is
asked to reconstruct Sailor’s head for Anil and Sarath so that they can identify Sailor’s
true identity. Unable to digest the grief and agony of losing his wife, he
subconsciously reconstructs the face after his wife Sirissa, his disappeared wife.
When Sarath shares the tragedy of Sirissa with Anil, she could not help shedding tears.
Ananda comforts her: “He moved two steps forward and with his thumb creased away
the pain around her eye along with her tears’ wetness. It was the softest touch on her
face” (AG 187). The gradual mutual understanding because of their cosmopolitan
interactions would help fulfill to the healing process. When Ananda commits suicide,
Anil comes to rescue him in time. These two opposing characters finally start to bond
with each other.
A more irresolvable tension exists between the two brothers, Sarath and Gamini.
Their tension ends up with Gamini being Sarath’s “least favourite relative. The one
you can never relax with or feel secure with. Your unhappy shadow” (AG 288). In the
end, Sarath sacrifices his life to save investigation and Anil and he is cruelly tortured
to death: “every tooth had been removed, the nose cut apart, the eyes humiliated with
liquids, the ears entered” (AG 299). Gamini is in charge of analyzing dead bodies. He
recognizes that one of them is his brother. Though Sarath could not speak any more,
Gamini believes that this has the potential to be “the beginning of a permanent
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conversation with Sarath” (AG 288). Gamini touches his brother’s face. This scene
shows a “metamorphosis” of Gamini as he experiences “this reversal back into love
and life” (AG 288). The image of the pietà appears many years after their long
hostility. Gamini finally embraces his deceased brother with love and empathy,
symbolizing a transformation of hostility to hospitality.
In the last scene of Anil’s Ghost, the artist Ananda is on the ladder painting eyes
for the newly erected Buddha. The boy touches him on the shoulder: “He felt the
boy’s concerned hand on his. This sweet touch from the world” (AG 307). It is clear
that Ondaatje’s continuous emphasis on empathy between human beings, even
between originally opposing characters, demonstrates his cosmopolitan stance.
Ondaatje’ readers would be familiar with the image of touching. When being
touched by another human being, two alien bodies can instantly connect with each
other: “how we fumble with the cumbersome foreignness of things even as we caress
them into human shape through work and art” (Kertzer 118).
What is striking about the novel is that Ondaatje is able to make the case for
reconciliation by effectively navigating through opposing philosophical and
ideological stances. Chief among these oppositions is the antagonism between
nationalism’s universalist tradition and rooted cosmopolitanism’s concern for
difference. Ondaatje creates a therapeutic project in the novel that rises above the
unjust social and political climate in the country. He has always shown a postmodern
skepticism towards “grand narratives” of history, which on some level explains his
cautious attitude towards the existing powers. Anil’ Ghost enables its readers to reflect
upon the consequences of not handling difference well. Ondaatje’s novel sheds light
on how to find a way out of the silencing force and alienating force of opposing
differences. It helps cultivate empathy which is essential for healing. In this novel
Ondaatje establishes an ameliorative discourse of cosmopolitanism: to acknowledge
differences between human beings and the limits of political reconciliation; to heal the
wounded and broken; to envision a just and harmonious community of a shared future
for mankind.
In last scene of Anil Ghost, Ondaatje makes an abrupt shift. He abandons the
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narrative of Anil’s whereabouts after the meeting. The novel ends without a closure of
the main character which would be essential for other “detective stories”. He chooses
to end the novel with Ananda performing the tradition of Nētra Mangala where he
paints the eyes of statues of Buddha. Ondaatje has already completed an unflinching
account of the chaos and the violence. But he intends to inspire and induce readers
with a longing for a cosmopolitan spirit and salvation, which explains his sudden shift
to a healing moment in the final pages. The Statue of Buddha was broken into pieces
in the war, but the local work together and manage to reestablish it.
But this scene draws a lot of criticism. Qadri Ismail criticizes the novel for
promoting Buddhist Sinhala nationalism: “nowhere in the entire novel, do we find any
engagement with the Tamil claim to being oppressed” (Ismail 28). With a solid
understanding of the culture and language of Sri Lanka like Ismail, it is easy to see
that “all the place names noticed by the text when it sees the National Atlas of Sri
Lanka are Sinhala ones” (Ismail 39). That’s why Ismail concludes with a condemning
tone: “all the significant actants in a story about Sri Lanka are Sinhala” (Ismail 39)
There is little doubt that Ismail would not care for the final scene of the novel when a
statue of Buddha is re-erected, to which he responds “clearly a metaphor for restoring
a pure Buddhism in war torn Sri Lanka” (Ismail 28).
Given that it is a cosmopolitan reading of the works studied in this dissertation, I
do not intend to defend Ondaatje right away. Because to bridge the gaps between
differences, we have to first acknowledged them first. From Tamil’s standpoint it
would be futile to find excuses for the dominant image of Buddhism, no matter how
many times “neutral” is used to soften Buddhism’s nationalist image. Gillian Roberts
interprets the Buddha image in the novel and highlights the word “neutrality” in
Buddhism’s healing power. The problem is that Roberts fails to legitimize the word
with his subjective statement. Because from Tamil’s standpoint, Ismail’s criticism
carries a considerable amount of reason. There is admittedly a preference against them
apropos of the religion. There is no doubt that Buddhism is a major theme and
imagery in the novel. Buddhism appears as early as in the preface in the Miner’s folk
song: “Blessed be the life wheel on the mine’s pit head” (AG Epigraph). Life wheel in
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the context refers to the hoist, a machine that is used as an elevator in a mine. It also
alludes to the Buddhist concept Bhavacakra, a symbolic representation of samsara, or
cyclic existence. Such references to Buddhism run abundant in the course of the story.
For instance, Gamini the doctor “reached out and touched the small Buddha in the
niche of the wall as he passed it” (AG 120). The presence of Buddha in the local
hospital reinforces its dominant position of deity and protection. Needless to mention
the last scene. It is reasonable to express concern especially reading in the context of
what Tambiah elaborates:
The phenomenon of the late eighties may be seen by some observes as the
final shift of “political Buddhism” from a more localized religiosity of earlier
times primarily enacted among monk-laity circles in villages and towns in
terms of ethical teachings, moral concerns, and gift-giving (dana) to a vocal
and sloganized ‘religious-mindedness,’ which has objectified and fetishized
the religion and espoused a “Buddhist nationalism,” even as regards the
monks themselves, so that important tenets of their religion regarding
detachment, compassion, tranquility, and non-violence and the overcoming of
mental impurities are subordinated and made less relevant to Sinhala-religio-
nationalist and social reform goals. In this changed context, Buddhism in its
militant, populist, fetishized form, as espoused by certain groups, seems to
some observers to have been emptied of much of its normative and humane
ethic . . . and to function as a marker of crowd and mob identity, as a rhetorical
mobilizer of volatile masses, and as an instigator of spurts of violence. (Qtd. in
Goldman 30)
A selective reading in a pre-choreographed conclusion undoubtedly would lead
to such understanding. Although we have to admit a cultural preference shown with
Ondaatje using Buddhism in the novel, we should clarify what role Buddhism plays in
the novel.
The most controversial scene is the ending scene with the reconstruction of the
broken statue of Buddha. The artisan to fulfill the task is named Ananda, a character
named after one of the Buddha’s constant attendants. Is Ondaatje promoting the
unifying power of dominant Buddhism? We may find the answer in the following
detail. The statue’s face has been broken into more than “one hundred chips and
splinters of stone. Ananda and his team originally plan to “homogenize the stone,
blend the face into a unit” (AG 302). But Ananda eventually leaves it as it was.
Homogenization is a key word that is often used to criticize cosmopolitanism,
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addressing its doctrine of eliminating all cultural and ethical particularities. Or in
other words, cosmopolitanism is an imperialism in disguise. But through Ananda’s
choice, Ondaatje demonstrates a symbolic image: all these pieces in different shape
manage to co-exist as a whole not because of a homogenizing process. It to some
extent resonates with the new cosmopolitanism being about “embracing difference,
then it is about bridging gaps rather than eradicating them” (Patell 10).

3.3 Cosmopolitan Patriot

The novel gains its narrative impetus from the revelation of Sailor’s identity. It
can therefore be partially seen as a detective story. This genre is fascinating because
readers expect certain elements and patterned process: a mystery, the evil, the search
for truth and its revelation, and the punishment. A satisfying triumph of justice is a
trademark for this genre. The whole process normally does not require too much
ethical meditation. Because ethical stances are usually pre-established in detective
novels. Anil’s perception of justice is pre-established as well. She believes that as long
as she can prove that the government is responsible for Sailor’s death, she can help
reveal the political murder to the public.
The investigation takes place fifteen years after her departure from Sri Lanka.
She has little idea of the complicacy and intensity of the war waging on in Sri Lanka.
Her return may appear to be a patriotic move at first glance. But her application to the
United Nations’ Center for Human Rights is actually only “half-hearted”. Therefore,
by the time she comes back to Sri Lanka, she has actually lost her patriotism for the
country as a Sri Lankan. Instead, she comes back out of a cosmopolitan empathy. It is
with time that Anil finally is transformed into a cosmopolitan patriot.
She could not understand why the Sri Lankan government agrees to her
investigation. The latter wants no justice to be done by the human rights organization.
The local authorities cave in mainly because it has to soothe trading partners in the

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West.
It was a Hundred Years’ War with modern weaponry and backers on the
sidelines, a war sponsored by gun- and drug-runner. It became evident that
political enemies were secretly joined in financial arms deals. (AG 56)
The complicacy of the Civil War starts an endless cycle of killing, revenge,
which is powered by the hostile energy between the opposing forces Sri Lanka. “All
that was left of law was a belief in an eventual revenge towards those who had power”
(AG 56). Knowing the logic of revenge, Sarath foresees that to identify the skeleton
may lead to another wave of revenge rather than the justice Anil expects. Sarath
believes that there is little prospect in putting an end to this vicious cycle, which
explains why he initially doubts the value of truth. The cycle of revenge blurs the
demarcation between victims and malefactors:
“Every side was killing and hiding the evidence. Every side. This is an
unofficial war, no one wants to alienate the foreign powers. So it’s secret
gangs and squads. Not like Central America. The government was not the only
one doing the killing. You had, and still have, three camps of enemies—one in
the north, two in the south—using weapons, propaganda, fear, sophisticated
posters, censorship. Importing state-of-the-art weapons from the West, or
manufacturing homemade weapons. A couple of years ago people just started
disappearing. Or bodies kept being found burned beyond recognition. There’s
no hope of affixing blame. And no one can tell who the victims are.” (AG 17)
Every crime that takes place in Sri Lanka involves forces of all sides. Therefore,
it is futile to ascribe responsibility. For instance, when Anil asks Sarath about the
death of Nãrada the monk: “That monk you told me about, who killed him” (AG 48)?
Sarath knows the answer would be difficult for Anil to understand since rumor has it
that the monk’s murder was actually organized by his own novice: “Now we all have
blood on our clothes” (AG 48).
The skeleton is unearthed in a sixth-century archeological preserve that is only
accessible to the government. Anil’s logic works as follows: She concludes that the
skeleton “doesn’t seem sixth-century” (AG 20) based on her forensic knowledge.
Since the skeleton is buried in a government-protected preserve, it must have been
removed from another site and by someone working for the government. Anil believes
that “One village can speak for many villages. One victim can speak for many victims”
(AG 176). She is certain that it would build a powerful case against the Sri Lankan
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government.
Sarath says to her: “I know you feel the purpose of truth is more complicated,
that it’s sometimes more dangerous here if you tell the truth” (AG 53). Sarath’s
mentor Palipana also sides with him, pointing out “Most of the time in our world,
truth is just opinion” (AG 102). This postmodernist interpretation of truth denies an
oversimplified and preconceived pursuit of justice.
Anil and Sarath’s investigation is assisted by a variety of figures: Sarath’s teacher
and mentor Palipana, a blind epigraphist; an artist called Ananda who helps to
reconstruct the skeleton’s face in order to identify it; Sarath’s younger brother Gamini,
a doctor. The team has made progress in the investigation, obtaining information
about Sailor’s identity. They manage to deduce its name and locate its hometown. But
at this critical moment, Sarath leaves for Colombo with Anil at Sailor’s hometown.
Panicked, Anil is concerned that Sarath might report to the authorities and sabotage
her plan. Having no confidence in Sarath, she disobeys his warning and leaves the
town for Colombo, where she ends up being confronted by a room full of government
officials and military personnel. Among them stands Sarath, who is now extremely
hostile towards Anil. What Anil does not know is that Sarath’s hostility is part of his
strategy to save her and the skeleton. In the end, the plan succeeds but Sarath is
murdered.
During the investigation, Anil and Sarath apply two completely different
methodologies. Educated in the West and trained as a forensic scientist, Anil talks and
thinks in a highly rational fashion: “summarizing the facts of his death…the
permanent truth…. She could read Sailor’s last actions by knowing the wounds on
bone” (AG 64-5). While Sarath believes that one’s identity dwells in the lived
experiences instead of one’s remains. The following conversation embodies their
discrepancy:
“You’re an archaeologist. Truth comes finally into the light. It’s in the bones
and sediment.”
“It’s in character and nuance and mood.”
“That is what governs us in our lives, that’s not the truth.”
“For the living it is the truth,’ he quietly said.” (AG 259)

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 Anil, like the writer himself, straddles more than one country and one culture. A
major challenge for Anil is the problem of solidarity, meaning “an experience of
willed affiliation” (Hollinger 91). The competition for royalty intensifies for people
like Anil because they have to deal with multiple, and sometimes opposing claims of
descent, religion, nationality, etc.
Anil has instilled in her mind the Western philosophy of justice and redistribution.
Her firm belief explains why she is so convinced that the revelation of the crimes the
Sri Lankan government commit is an essential step to take to right the wrong. She is
unable to see through the fog of violence in the political and social contexts that lie
behind the civil war, which differs drastically from the contexts that breed the theories
Anil dogmatically practices from the beginning. Anil’s unwavering determination
should also be interpreted from another perspective. Before leaving the United States,
Anil has been sent reports that are collected by various human rights groups claiming
that “Early investigations had led to no arrests” (AG 42). Knowing the initial
unsuccessful failures yet still determined to come on board shows a vital
cosmopolitan quality: her determination to shoulder moral obligations to people far
away.
The conversation between Anil and Sarath is a cosmopolitan conversation. Given
Anil’s background, her return is bound to clash with Sarath and other Sri Lankan
citizens, because there are a lot of cultural and political differences between them.
Ondaatje creatively builds a character drawing from his personal background instead
of using a white Westerner. Ondaatje’s educational background in many ways
resembles Anil the fictional character. This colonial background puts Anil in a
position where she could have access to very unique experiences and understandings
that are not accessible to non-transnational individuals. Anil’s multicultural
background would easily, or even automatically, “instigate a literature of dislocation
and displacement” (Sanghera 6).
But Anil challenges the traditional category of diasporic characters. At first
glance, Anil is a typical diaspora since she is dislocated in terms of her nationality and
cultural traits. However, as the story unfolds, we would find Anil’s subjectivity is
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fluid rather than static. Anil is capable of altering her subjectivity when she interacts
with others. The way her subjectivity evolves demonstrates how one’s identity is
constructed in terms of language, customs and ideology. Therefore, Anil obviously
does not fit in the common category of diaspora. The novel is larger than the
presupposed post-colonial novels in that it focuses on the potential of border-crossing
and boundary-breaking, which is essential to cosmopolitan practice.
Sarath warns that Anil’s search for justice in this case could lead to problematic
results. Usually the human rights investigations unavoidably choose to side with one
of the opposing forces. Educated in the West, Anil depends heavily on logical
reasoning during the entire course of investigation. When the Western idea of justice
is imposed in a non-Western context, such operations would occur without a biased
and insufficient understanding of the cultural and political climate of the local context.
It is easy to recognize the early tension between Anil, who represents the Western
perspective, and Sarath, who represents the Eastern perspective. Ondaatje urges his
readers to rethink the concept of justice and the methods used in human rights
operations. “The “universality” and “objectivity” of international law originated from
Western philosophies are called into question in Anil’s Ghost.
It starts by a human rights mission of reconstructing an identity for a nameless
skeleton, a victim of the civil war. Along with the investigation, Ondaatje explores the
conflicts, its consequences, power relations and boundaries that separate people.
Through Anil’s changing identity and attitude, Ondaatje advances border-crossing and
boundary-breaking understanding which is essential to cosmopolitanism. It is not hard
to notice that Ondaatje intentionally steers away from interrogating issues of political
responsibility in this novel. What we should understand is that he leads us to
scrutinize the cosmopolitan responsibility at the individual level. By the
exemplification of hostility turning into hospitality, Ondaatje successfully reveals the
man-made boundaries we use to separate each other and the potential of a
cosmopolitan world.
Anil’s exit from the narrative happens in a rather open and unconventional
fashion. Readers will close the book and reflect upon her unexplained disappearance.
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Whether she would return to the West or stay in Sri Lanka remains a question without
any definite answer. Thanks to her UK passport and Sarath’s sacrifice, she is able to
flee “back in the adopted country of her choice” (AG 285). Neither does the novel tell
us how much Anil is influenced and shaped by the investigation. But if we take a look
at Sarath’s last comment on her, we would come to a conclusion. “Then he heard her
say, ‘I think you murdered hundreds of us.’ Hundreds of us. Sarath thought to himself.
Fifteen years away and she is finally us” (AG 272). Sarath’s final acceptance of Anil
is the ultimate acknowledgement of her as a cosmopolitan patriot, which is used to
describe those who would:
accept the citizens’ responsibility to nurture the culture and politics of their
homes. Many would, no doubt, spend their lives in the places that shaped them
and that is one of the reasons local cultural practices would be sustained and
transmitted. But many would move, and that would mean that cultural
practices would travel also (as they have always travelled). The result would
be a world in which each local form of human life is the result of long-term
and persistent processes of cultural hybridization— a world, in that respect,
much like the world we live in now. Cosmopolitan patriots can be and should
be attached to a country of their own. At the same time, they embrace
transnational talks to bridge gaps among different civilizations. (Appiah 22)
The concept of citizenship consists of three main elements. To begin with,
citizenship as a legal status is defined by civil, political and social rights: Here, the
citizen is the legal person free to act according to the law and having the right to claim
the law’s protection. The second addresses citizens as political agents that participate
in a society’s political institutions in an active way. While the third considers
citizenship as membership in a political community which plays a vital role in identity
construction.
The kind of cosmopolitan citizenship that Ondaatje depicts in the novel is drastically
different from Kant’s proposal, which is more of a legal one. In fact, in the current
political climate, Kant’s project would be impossible to be carried out. The
cosmopolitan citizenship in Anil’s Ghost is gained without a legal affirmation. Anil is
“citizened by their friendship” (AG 200). This citizenship transcends the boundaries
of nation and sees the entire humanity as a whole.
The era we are living in is “of extreme nationalism and violent conflict” (Orjuela

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184). Our identities are “instrumentally politicized, polarized and threatened” (Orjuela
184). Therefore, we hear an urgent call for alternatives for the promotion of an
openness to difference, for conversations across borders and for boundaries-breaking
practices. Ondaatje manages to compose a semi-detective story that provides a lab for
us to scrutinize the conflict not only on a national level but more importantly on the
individual level.
The cosmopolitan reading of Anil’s Ghost enhances our understanding of the
ways in which ethnicity, religion and politics affect and are affected by identification
processes. Although the novel does not offer a resolution to the war-torn island, it
does however start a healing process that is urgent for the Sri Lankan people. Anil’s
transformation from a rootless cosmopolitan to a rooted cosmopolitan sheds light on
how to find a balance between the local and the global, which is undoubtedly valuable
to the building of a Community of Shared Future.

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 Chapter Four A Cosmopolitan Community in The Cat’s

Table

Michael Ondaatje’s latest novel, The Cat’s Table, was published in 2011. The
novel is in fact a book written by the fictional character Michael, sharing Ondaatje’s
first name. At 11year-old, Michael embarks on a three-week journey from Colombo,
Sri Lanka in the 1950s to London then later settles in Canada to become a writer.
Given that Ondaatje himself also sailed from Sri Lanka to England as a young child to
reunite with his mother and went to Canada to become a writer, it seems tempting to
categorize the novel as an autobiography. However, Ondaatje makes it clear in the
author’s note that novel “uses the colouring and locations of memoir and
autobiography” (CT 367), and it is “fictional—from the captain and crew and all its
passengers on the boat down to the narrator” (CT 367). The story is only deceptively
autobiographical.
The novel on the surface is a collection of seemingly random vignettes centering
around one or two major events happening on the ship: the death of the millionaire
and the escape of the prisoner. Ondaatje carries on the great tradition of The
Canterbury Tales of bringing people together on a trip where their personal stories are
shared. Our understanding of the characters is highly sensual as we rely heavily on
young Michael’s narrative. Michael does not always introduce character that he
encounters on the ship. From his perspective, the cast of adults at cat’s table are
almost mythic in terms of their personailty and identity. But the novel actually has
multiple narrators: young Michael, the present-day Michael and a third-person
narrator, etc. Therefore, there will be typical Ondaatje shifts between the past and
present. Reader will occasionally follow the narrator off the ship years later after the
journey in London and Canada. The occasional shifts from scene to scene creates the
narrative fluidity and also the fluidity of the characters. Their identity and true figure
vary and mutate along the process. The reader has to constantly alter their
understanding of these chracters.

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 The novel commences with Michael stepping abord the liner, named the Oronsay,
in Colombo and ends with him arriving in London. The story mainly takes place in
the microcosmos on the ship. Compared with airplane routes, which “took only
two-thirds of a day” (CT 82), voyage on the ship enables the characters to fully
interact with each other for a prolonged period of three weeks. This is one of the
reasons why the ship can be seen as a micro-cosmos. It is long enough for the
protagonist to interact with others. However, Ondaatje, like he always does, allows
memory to take charge of the pace of the narrative as he breaks down the
confinements of conventional chronological narrative.
Young Michael travels for three weeks on the Oronsay. The gigantic liner has
seven levels which creates a special space that are full of people from all walks of life.
This milieu is special for a handful of reasons: the ship is constantly on the move,
traversing from Colombo on the Indian Ocean, entering the red sea, landing in Port
Aden, then through Suez Canal and reaching Port Said on the coast of the
Mediterranean, and then the Atlantic to Thames and arriving in London.
Critics have expressed a mixed reception of the novel in terms of its form. Jess
Row argues that Ondaatje “has shaken off all traces of that torpor and produced a
work that contains almost no sign of his recognizable style”4. We have to admit that in
terms of the narrative structure of this novel, Ondaatje does not experiment as much
as he has done in his previous novels. He is more focused on the protagonist this time.
But it would be unfair to say that the novel hardly reads like an Ondaatje novel at all.
To begin with, the novel is still very fragmented with its narrative. The temporal and
spatial shifts happen unpredictably from England to Canada. In addition, Ondaatje
skillfully inserts a letter from Miss Lasqueti recounting one of the major vignette that
takes place on Onronsay from her perspective, thus helping the reader finally make
sense of Michael’s one-sided story. The overt rejection the idea of fixed identity, the
co-existence of people and the consistent interest in craftsmanship, from the bridge
builder to the sapper and now botanist and ship dismantler, every ounce of The Cat’s

4
http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/michael-ondaatje-2011-10/

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Table tastes Ondaatje.

4.1 Cosmopolitan Bildungsroman

The novel has not received enough attention from the literary critics yet. There
are only a handful of articles published. There has been a heated discussion in dozens
of book reviews online, which only flirt with several major features of the novel. It is
generally acknowledged that the novel is about education and initiation.
The Cat’s Table is undoubtedly a Bildungsroman: “all the elements of a typical
Bildungsroman are present- a youth on a journey, growth, and change” (Barratt 111).
But Barratt also argues that it is an average coming-of-age narrative. In this chapter.
The novel uses child’s innocence to dramatize the subtle construction of the
subjectivity of the young narrator. Drawing upon cosmopolitan theories, we can
explore Michael’s search for connection in a world full of strangers and re-imagine
the politics of identity that is rooted in national soil, all of which can help us think
beyond these cultural roots in pursuit of building a community of shared future.
Ondaatje’s novels, with his unique understanding of displacement and trauma,
speak a different language from typical post-colonial novels. Therefore, to fully
understand his uniqueness we begin from a different perspective. Drawing upon
post-colonial or post-modernist theories, both of which are of great value, this chapter
interprets it as a Bildungsroman through the lens of cosmopolitanism.
This chapter resonates with that of Ann Punt for both have noticed the novel
“incorporates notions of rites of passage” (Punt 36).
While still on the ship, in the midst of the nomadic journey, Michael is not aware
of the transforming power of the journey itself and the cast of characters he interacts
with on the ship. But years later when he reflects upon the three weeks in hindsight,
he realizes its lasting influence and acknowledges it as “A rite of passage”:
THE THREE WEEKS OF THE SEA JOURNEY, as I originally remembered
it, were placid. It is only now, years later, having been prompted by my
children to describe the voyage, that it becomes an adventure, when seen

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 through their eyes, even something significant in a life. A rite of passage. (CT
72)
The concept of “a rite of passage” is of great significance for us to study children
entering adulthood. The renowned Dutch-German-French ethnographer and folklorist
Arnold Van Gennep (1873-1957) first used the term in 1909. He observes that the life
of any individual in any society consists of a series of passages “from one age to
another or from one occupation to another” (Van Gennep 3). In Gennep’s discourse,
the rites refer to those “that accompany transitions from one situation to another and
from one cosmic or social world to another” (Van Gennep 13).
However, this chapter does not analyze the novel strictly according to the three
stages in Van Gennep’s discourse, given that his focus is more anthropologically
oriented. According to Van Gennep, the three crucial stages include: “separation,
transition and incorporation”. While Van Gennep’s conceptualization of the concept is
deeply rooted in the anthropological field, its application in this chapter is from a
metaphorical standpoint.
Hill and Daniels note that a rite of passage is “a ritual that helps people make the
transition between life stages” (Hill and Daniels xiii). The most important rites of
most primitive cultures, as Marcus notes, “centers around the passage from childhood
or adolescence to maturity and full membership in adult society” (Marcus 221).
Reading Adrian H. Jaffe, Virgil Scott, Brooks and Warren, Marcus concludes that an
initiation story:
may be said to show its young protagonist experiencing a significant change
of knowledge about the world or himself, or a change of character, or of both,
and this change must point or lead him towards and adult world… it should
give some evidence that the change is at least likely to have permanent effects.”
(222)
Marcus highlights the importance of the change that takes place in initiation story,
which transforms the protagonist’s personhood or his/her understanding of the world.
The combination of initiation and travel in The Cat’s Table maximizes its potential to
explore such change. Passage, as Teather suggests, can be interpreted “in the sense of
transition” (Teather 1). We thread through passages, or transitions, that are heavily
influenced and even shaped by the institutional fabric of social life, such as family,

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ethnicity, religion and nationality, etc.
As a genre, Bildungsroman was originated in Germany. The genre was translated
into British culture and later American culture, which is embodied in fictions of
Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Theodore Dreiser, etc. The success with their
Bildungsroman lies in “the relative openness and fluidity of the society, the Protestant
interest in and respect for personal differences” (Jeffers 4). Traditionally, the crucial
theme in Bildungsroman is “precisely change-physical, psychological, moral” (Jeffers
2). The protagonist is what Bakhtin calls “the image of man in the process of
becoming” (Jeffers 2). Bildungsroman, according to Boes, is “a genre that has been
linked with modern nationalism since the term’s first employment by Karl
Morgenstern in the second decade of the nineteenth century” (Mahoney 432). But he
argues that novels making up this genre generate a cosmopolitan remainder that
“resists nationalism’s aim for closure” (Redfield 719). Boes calls these remainders as
the cosmopolitan aspects of the Bildungsroman. Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table
undertakes an extension of cosmopolitan elements as a cosmopolitan Bildungsroman.
The novel focuses on the transcultural and transnational culture contact that has
become common in reality.
By categorizing it as a cosmopolitan coming-of-age novel, this chapter continues
to use aforementioned concepts under the umbrella of cosmopolitanism. To begin
with, there is transposition, which means the dynamic construction of subjectivity.
The way young Michael’s subjectivity transforms during the voyage can now be
studied from a different perspective. Apart from unraveling Ondaatje’s coded message,
this chapter would shed light on the study of maritime narrative as well. The
particularity of the voyage is also manifested in its route. A typical colonial Western
maritime narrative would tend to tell stories in terms of how its characters try to
homogenize the rest of the world. Therefore, there would normally be two places in
the world in those narratives: the West and the Rest. On the contrary, Michael’s
voyage includes the Arabic Port Aden and the African Port Said. The narrator, being a
Sri Lankan, and later as a cosmopolitan, experiences cultural difference in these
places, a scenario that the West usually could not or would not acknowledge.
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Therefore, this Bildungsroman is actually written for adult readers who are familiar
with displacement and transnational interaction.
As a Bildungsroman, it is common for the main character to be a teenager. But
what are the differences between teenager character and adult character in terms of
cosmopolitan discussion? There are at least three differences.
To begin with, children are less culturally and ideologically imprinted than adults.
The narrator has two companions: the troublemaker Cassius and the contemplative
Ramadhin who are about his age and also travelling alone on the same ship. They are
determined to be mischievous from the beginning of the journey. The three of them
form a band and they live by one rule: every day they want to do at least one thing
that is forbidden. Free from parental guidance, they rise before the sun does, sneak
into the first-class pool and raid the sundeck’s breakfast table.
In fact, Michael appears to be rather rootless. He deems that he and Emily “don’t
belong anywhere” (CT 347). Michael’s sense of insecure rootlessness is enhanced
when he and Cassius mischievously decide to stay in the lifeboat instead of hiding in
their rooms in the face of a storm.
It is worthy to reaffirm that although Ondaatje tends to blur the influences of
ethnicity and nationality in his novels, his intension is by no means an attempt to
dissolve these borders. His attitude has always been clear with such issues. As the
precedent three chapters show Ondaatje is in favor of rooted cosmopolitanism.
Therefore, the blurring of these borders is an effort to shift our attention to the real
action, to embrace differences as opportunities, to give up the fertile binary mindset.
Children’s understanding of the world also differs from that of adults. This
breaks down certain preconceived expectations before reading. It is an essential step
to take for cosmopolitan reading. For example, Mr. Fonseka, an English teacher
“traveling to England to be a teacher”, sees England as “the centre of culture”.
However, when Michael finally arrives at London, he sees England from a totally
different perspective:
When the dawn eventually lit whatever was around us, it seemed a humble
place. We saw no green riverbanks or famous cities or great spanning bridges

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 that might open up their two arcs to let us through. Everything we were
passing seemed a remnant from another industrial time—jetties, saltings, the
entrances to dredged channels. (CT 363)
There are subtler details that break down expectations. While visiting Flavia
Prins in the carpeted First Class Lounge, Young Michael tells her that he has made
two friends, one of whom is named Ramadhin. Prins’s response to hearing the name is:
“Ramadhin… Is that the Muslim boy, from the cricketing family?” As an adult, Prins
is more likely to categorize people, especially strangers, in terms of their religion,
financial status. She reads people and understand them according to the social codes.
Given that Prins is a Dutch name, Michael means “who is like God” in Hebrew and
the fact they celebrate Christmas, it is safe to conclude that Flavia Prins and Michael’s
family are most likely to be Christians. This explains Prins’ initial reaction. To her,
religious difference separates people. However, after obtaining these two new pieces
of information, young Michael, who has not yet been ideologically “initiated”, only
focuses on the second part. The way he interprets it also differs from that of Prins:
I said I didn’t know but would ask him. My Ramadhin seemed to have no
physical prowess whatsoever. He had a passion for sweets and condensed milk.
Thinking of this, I pocketed a few biscuits while Mrs. Prins was attempting to
catch the eye of the waiter. (CT 21)
Young Michael’s innocent stream of consciousness confounds Prins’ taxonomic
system. The huge gap between their reactions to difference underlines the importance
of Michael being a child for Ondaatje’s advocation of a cosmopolitan openness to
difference.
The third reason why a child narrator works better than an adult is because the
fact that the narrator as an eleven-year-old child has the potential to dramatize,
especially the construction of a self under the influence of otherness and difference.
Michael learns about adults “simply by being in their midst”. As adults, our
subjectivity experiences lesser and weaker transformations than children:
“SOMETIMES WE FIND OUR TRUE and inherent selves during youth. It is a
recognition of something that at first is small within us, that we will grow into
somehow” (CT 202).
Before the voyage, young Michael has not yet fully developed his subjectivity.

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As he reminisces his childhood in Sri Lanka in his adulthood: “What was I in those
days? I recall no outside imprint, and therefore no perception of myself” (CT 36). The
outside imprint here refers to cultural roots and other social influences. His youth
means he is under little effects of these cultural roots. The reason why he deduces the
effects of cultural roots in the novel is to experiment with the openness to difference
to the extreme. Being a pre-adolescent, Michael is not attached to the culture of his
country of origin too closely. These cultural traits, when deeply imprinted, are more
protective and dominant in the face of otherness and difference, which explains why it
would be more difficult for adults to cultivate cosmopolitan perspective towards
difference. Young Michael is psychologically ready and eager to be “imprinted”. He is
curious about his surroundings, which means he is ready to interact with people,
especially those who are culturally different from him:
Who realises how contented feral children are? The grasp of the family fell
away as soon as I was out the door. Though among ourselves we must have
been trying to understand and piece together the adult world, wondering what
was going on there and why. But once we climbed the gangplank onto the
Oronsay, we were for the first time by necessity in close quarters of the adults.
(CT 36)
The separation from familial control enables Michael to get fully involved with
strangers. Ondaatje intentionally places the character on the sea to steer away from the
land that is highly associated with ideological and cultural confines. Characters worry
less over the problem of solidarity: “unlike the land, the sea never retains the impress
of human civilization” (Punt 20). This arrangement enables the young child character
to disengage with expected social codes, thus dissolving the dominant opposites and
opening up potential opportunities that dwell in the in-between spaces. But it is by no
means an ideal arrangement. Because Michael, innocent as he is, does eventually get
exposed to the cruelty and harshness of the social hierarchy, racial discrimination and
moral corruption.
Initiation is not only metaphorical in this novel. It is of a meta sense as education
is a dominant feature of Michael’s journey. Multiple characters give lessons to the
three boys during the journey. Mr. Mazappa tells them that “this voyage would be a
great education” (CT 11). Freedenberg keenly observes that “The ship functions as
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both a classroom and a laboratory” for young Michael and his companions. Nearly
everyone on the ship can be Michael’s teacher, and he is given all kinds of lessons.
There is a “large and gentle man” (CT 12) Mr. Nevil, who is a retired ship dismantler
on the ship. The three boys seek out Mr. Nevil often because the latter has “detailed
knowledge about the structure of ships” (CT 12). Through Mr. Nevil, they are
clarified “all the dangerous and not-so-dangerous possibilities” (CT 12) on the ship,
which leads to their bold attempt to stay in the lifeboat during the storm.
Among the many teachers, Mr. Mazappa the pianist has impacted Michael and
his two companions tremendously. In fact, it is Mr. Mazappa who takes the boys
“under his wing” (CT 11) and suggests that they should keep their eyes and ears open
because “this voyage would be a great education” (CT 11). He is the reason why the
three children “become curious together” by the end of their first day. In addition to
pointing out the pedagogical potential of the trip, Mr. Mazappa imparts his wisdom to
Michael directly. Out of the many lessons he gives, it is his emphasis on sexuality and
woman that sticks out. To begin with, Mr. Mazappa regales the three boys with
“confusing and often obscene lyrics from songs he knew” (CT 11). Mr. Mazappa
warns Michael “women will sweet-talk, and give you the big eye… I am protecting
you with what I know” (CT 37). And as an eleven-year-old, Michael feels wounded in
advance with possibilities with women. Later when he grows up, he would experience
unsuccessful relationships with women just like Mr. Mazappa warns him on that ship.
There are three major forms of textbooks that have influenced and even shaped
Michael: which are music, movie and novel.
In the course of Ondaatje’s fiction writing, music has always been Ondaatje’s
literary weapon ever since Coming Through Slaughter, needless to mention the street
band in In the Skin of a Lion and the gramophone songs in The English Patient etc. Its
recurrence in all of his novels is more than a thematic preference. It is aesthetic as
well. Ondaatje revealed in a 2007 interview the way he writes a novel resembles “a
jazz musician approaches improvisation” (Lecker 2): “You begin with a territory, and
what follows is the adventure” (Lecker 2). By my count, The Cat’s Table includes
twenty-nine “music”. This section focuses on these references to music in an attempt
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to reveal how these musical references would help us understand the novel as a
cosmopolitan Bildungsroman. Reading Ondaatje’s novel is like listening to Jazz
music. From this perspective, it is safe to say that the education of music help Michael
and his two companions prepare for adventures. Here adventures are both literal and
metaphorical. Their encounters with strangers of different cultures and social classes
are also adventures. And music enables them to navigate through those difference
better.
As the ship continues to move Northwest, a film is shown on the deck. The ship
is only “days away from landing in Aden” (CT 118), a Yemeni port. With its long sea
border bridging both the eastern and western civilizations, Yemen has witnessed the
historical confluences of cultures. The authorities on the ship choose to project a
“somewhat tactless” movie, The Four Feathers, in which Arabians in the movie are
represented as barbarians: there is a scene that an Englishman has to get his face
branded so that he could pass him off as an Arab. The movie is being shown in two
locations:
It had begun half an hour earlier in the Pipe and Drums Bar in First Class,
projected to a quieter group of about forty well-dressed passengers; when the
first reel was over, that segment of the film was rewound and carried in a
metal container down to our projector on deck for its alfresco showing, while
the First Class audience watched the second reel. As a result, there were
confusing fall-outs of sound that merged the two screenings. (CT 119)
The “quieter group of about forty well-dressed passengers” in the Pipe and
Drums Bar in First Class and the hundred people “who had made up a restless
audience” (CT 118) on the Deck outside the Celtic Room establish two images
co-existing in one narrative.
The Jankla Troupe perform for Michael’s group while they wait for the first-class
reel to be over. When the first-class passengers are witnessing the brutal massacre of
English troops, “exultant cheers rose from our(Michael’s) audience” (CT 120).
Through the immediacy of the contrast, Ondaatje manages to accomplish two
goals. To begin with, the scene ironizes the hierarchy between the West and the East
that has been plaguing the world. Secondly, it deduces the hostility by highlighting
Michael’s somewhat childish reaction to the movie: “The sound system was not good,
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besides which we were not used to atonal English accents” (CT 119). The rejection to
engage in talks over endless loop of binary opposites exemplifies Ondaatje’s
cosmopolitan perspective of difference and otherness.
Michael adds a fictional anecdote of A. E. W. Mason, writer of The Four
Feathers. It “turned out to be an old boy” of Michael’s school. Antje M. Rauwerda
notes the fact that the author of a colonialist novel attends the same school as Michael
is a quick joke (Rauwerda 42).
The novel openly critiques the long existing racism in the Western society
towards immigrants, which has fueled misunderstanding and conflicts. Mr. Forseka
travels to England to be a teacher of literature and history. He packs “all those foxed
Penguin editions of Orwell and Gissing and the translations of Lucretius” (CT 80)
with him. England is “the centre of culture” (CT 81) to him. Michael notes that Mr.
Fonseka “must have believed it would be a humble but good life for an Asian living in
England, where something like his Latin grammar could be a distinguishing sword”
(CT 80). However, the presumably center of culture place where racism dominates. It
starts with daily trivia. For instance, for immigrants like Michael and Mr. Fonseka,
their accent is likely to be laughed at or even insulted: “the same slights and insults
and embarrassments over the pronouncing of the letter v and our rushed manner of
speaking” (CT 81).
Michael is most educated through the writing of his voyage, which he initially
wants to entitle “Voyage of the Mynah” (CT 361). “This account is for him. For the
other friend from my youth” (CT 62). Michael has actually practiced writing while he
is still on the ship, though not with paper and pen. To begin with, he retells stories to
his two friends, and that is actually how he gets his nickname “mynah”, a bird known
for repeating: “Also it is an unofficial bird, and unreliable, its voice not fully
trustworthy in spite of the range. At that time, I suppose, I was the mynah of the group,
repeating whatever I overheard to the other two” (CT 202). Another practice is done
when Michael is used by Baron to assist him to commit theft. That’s when Michael
recognizes that he can pretend to be someone else, which is essential for a writer.
The Cat’s Table as a Bildungsroman is unique in its combination of another genre
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and that is travel literature. Travel literature is known for constructing a world as the
protagonist navigates through borders that demarcate cultures and nations. The whole
process is a rejection of a fixed locale, which mirrors the increasing transnational
travels of the world. Terence Bowers notes that travel is “not just physical movement;
it is also a form of symbolic engagement” (Bowers 6). A culture or a nation is marked
and encoded. A person is culturally and ethically defined by these codes, which means
he/she would be expected to behave accordingly. Therefore, the act of traveling
involves crossing from one system of codes to another, which could mean both
potential or peril. It is in this sense that the voyage in travel literature can be seen as
explorations of system of meaning that defines the cosmos we inhabit. In addition to
reflecting the relationship with others, travel literature also provides a chance for
readers to rethink the construction of their identities. In this respect, travel literature
contains the power of transformation.
Travel as a socially significant activity enables us to construct an identity that
challenges existing taxonomy and hierarchy. Writing, though functions in a different
fashion than travel, is also employed to build up personhood and community. Instead
of repeating prevailing categories of characters, Ondaatje attempts to create new
characters who can change the existing pattern and break down boundaries. The
voyage of Michael and his other companions provokes the reader to imagine a
community where such boundaries would fade away when cross-border interactions
prevail. Michael’s travel account is especially important for cosmo-feminism because
it gives voice to female figures and makes women an equally crucial part of the
voyage. Ondaatje manages to accomplish this by boldly treating women as equal as
men in his literary imagination, which enhances our awareness of crushing the
boundaries of gender. Michael, Cassius and Ramadhin have all showed a
cosmopolitan empathy thanks to certain women figures. This demonstrates women’s
unique potential to cultivate moral obligations towards others.
Psychologically speaking, the trip can be seen as a preparation for his openness
to difference. This journey is a miniature for Michael’s nomadic life. Having lived in
at least three countries, Michael is used to meander through diverse ethnic and
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cultural particularities, sometimes even conflicting ones.
When Michel leaves his country of origin, he has little idea of what the voyage
has in store for him:
I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was. Perhaps a sense of self is not
there in his nervous stillness in the narrow bunk, in this green grasshopper or
little cricket, as if he had been smuggled away accidently, with no knowledge
of the act, into the future. (CT 5)
Moving from one location to another in the course of the voyage, Michael
experiences places as material localities. These bounded localities are “unbounded” in
the act of moving. What matters to Michael is not the name of the place he goes to.
Rather, it is the “space of place”. The space of place refers to “sense of place refers to
this link between place and meaning-an existential quality, difficult to define,
sometimes shared by many, sometimes different for each individual” (Teather 2).
These different places provide him various spaces where he interacts with other
individuals.
As the ship leaves behind “The brief and temporary world of El Suweis”,
Michael bids farewell to the new land and culture: “I was back on the railing,
watching, which was where Cassius was emotionally, when he was doing these
paintings. Good-bye, we were saying to all of them. Good-bye” (CT 182).
Michael’s nomadic journey on and off the ship enables him to define himself in
terms of transposition, rather than a fixed identity. Travel in this sense is a way of
being for Michael. The ship traverses two oceans from the East to the Arabic port and
then the African port and lastly the West.
Reading against David Pollock’s definition of Third Culture Kid, referring to a
person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the
parents’ culture, Antje Rauwerda categorizes Michael Ondaatje as a TCK. Rauwerda
points out that displacement is distinctive to the third culture child, who grows up
“being on the move and continually reassessing and reconstructing the self in
response to different cultural contexts” (Rauwerda 40). Because of the rapid
development of transportation, fluidity or nomadism has become characteristic of the
current world we are living in. The Cat’s Table traces this kind of journey and enlarges

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it for its readers. Given that Ondaatje did come from a former colony of the UK, it is
understandable for people to think of it as a postcolonial response to his experience.
But it is actually more than the easy assumption and expectation, both thematically
and aesthetically. It is worthy to note that although Rauwerda’s categorization helps
with my study, I do not intend to use the term because of the subtly disturbing
connotation of the word “third”. This chapter refers to Ondaatje and his character
Michael as cosmopolitans.
On board the same ship travels a man of great wealth who is in poor health. It is
a Sri Lankan philanthropist named Sir Hector. While acquiring his wealth, the Sri
Lankan has also acquired “a complete faith in the advancements of Europe” (CT 91).
He has been bit by a dog with rabies. It happens when he refers to a holy priest as “a
muttaraballa” (CT 87). Muttara means “urinating”, while balla means “dog”. He is
later bit by a dog. The wound is so severe that his life is threatened. Cursing a holy
priest in Sri Lanka shows that Sir Hector thinks little of his own culture. Ironically
though, not one English specialist is willing to come to Sri Lanka to deal with Sir
Hector’s medical problem. He decides to sail to England for the “best” medical care.
Here Michael’s travel narrative develops into a profound critique of Western
imperialism. Sir Hector is homogenized by Western ideology but he is not considered
as an equal. His tragic death on the ship in the end reaffirms Ondaatje’s stance in
terms of the Greek cosmopolitanism, which we have already studied in The English
Patient with the Indian sapper.
Conventionally speaking, sea novel has been associated with intriguing heroic
events that few readers could experience in person. However, the journey in The Cat’s
Table, also rich in intriguing encounters, can happen to ordinary people. It is a journey
from one culture to another. It is a journey of personal discovery through navigating
the confluence of difference. It is a journey of remaking the world by reimaging the
boundaries that segregate us.
The Cat’s Table establishes a voyage that crosses oceans and cultures, which
evokes a conversation of blended ethnicities and all walks of life. The novel is
abundant with characters that are normally silenced subjects in reality. By
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constructing the interactions between these characters from below, Ondaatje has
retrieved their voice. The sea evokes a sense of borderlessness thus helps
deemphasize boundaries. The vastness of the sea functions in the novel as an
in-between space where human interactions can be reimagined. The intricate and
various cast of adult characters can be seen as fragmented forces that are essential to
the construction of Michael’s subjectivity: “So we came to understand that small and
important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would
pass us without any personal involvement” (CT 176).
In search of a cosmopolitan subjectivity, Ondaatje breaks through the various
hurdles of boundaries. But Ondaatje does not treat the sea as an entirely borderless
utopia. As discussed earlier in the third chapter, the kind of cosmopolitanism Ondaatje
advocates in his works is a rooted cosmopolitanism. Therefore, Michael’s account of
the voyage is full of demarcations of the sea: “I’d crossed the Indian Ocean and the
Arabian Sea and the Red Sea, and gone through the Suez Canal into the
Mediterranean” (CT 9).
By doing so, Ondaatje not only creates a travel that transcends boundaries, but
also manages to respect these borders. The sea imagery of the travel initiates
transnational conversations which deal with problems caused by cultural and
ideological differences.

4.2 A Cosmopolitan Self and a Cosmopolitan Community

The ship is a miniature version of a cosmos with people of different cultural

backgrounds. In fact, there are not only human beings on board, but animals and
plants. The three boys are relegated to a table of eccentric characters: a mute tailor, a
retired ship dismantler, a pianist and a botanist. It is Miss Lasqueti who comes up with
the name “cat’s table” since they are “in the least privileged place”. The cat’s table, as
Alaa Alghamdi argues, “denotes social marginalization” (CT 12). It is arranged for

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people who are farthest away from power. Being a child with no social status, Michael
realizes that they are practically “invisible to officials such as the purser and the head
steward, and the captain” (CT 13). Their low social position limits their exposure to
scrutiny and social rules. The co-existence of the captain’s table and the cat’s table
proves that transnational interactions among human beings are not a privilege for the
elite. From Michael’s adventures on the ship we can see the vibrant culture contact
from below. And it is without doubt active and influential, as Michael realizes in his
adulthood: “It would always be strangers like them, at the various cat’s tables of my
life, who would alter me” (CT 270).
But Ondaatje intends to achieve more than just reconstructing a silenced life for
this marginal group of people. Echoing his project in In the Skin of a Lion, Ondaatje
continues to explore cosmopolitanism from below, highlighting the strength of the
cross-cultural interactions of the working class. Alghamdi observes that this novel
creates a new version of “postcolonial and postmodern identities” (Alghamdi 2). But
based on my previous study, it is fair to conclude that Ondaatje’s vision of the world
is cosmopolitan. Though there are overlaps, Ondaatje goes beyond the realms of
postcolonial discourse and enters a cosmopolitan vision. It is worthy to note that
Ondaatje builds a tension in the novel. And the tension comes from Michael’s
understanding of the world and that of the adults. An innocent child, Michael “is
seemingly unconcerned with otherness and limitations imposed by prejudices of the
larger culture” (Alghamdi 2), whereas the adults on board are highly imposed. It is
through the tension that the novel rejects a literary imagination of a borderless utopia
and encourages cross-cultural conversations, thus practicing rooted cosmopolitanism.
Before boarding on the ship, young Michael had been “trained into cautiousness”
(CT 16) in the Sri Lankan boarding school where he “learned to withhold small
pertinent truths” (CT 16) with “a fear of punishment” (CT 16). Traveling alone on the
nomadic journey allows him to be true to himself. He starts to interact with others,
thus enabling him to form his subjectivity in a drastic fashion. The Cat’s Table offers

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“a powerful examnination of one of his core obsessions: identity”5. Or in Charlotte
Boulay’s words, it “traces the search for belonging amidst strangers and strange
lands”6. But the construction of identity in Ondaatje’s novels is seldom about
obtaining possession of material or social status in the conventional sense. It is the
formation of a cosmopolitan self that Ondaatje’s novels are more concerned about.
The Cat’s Table is no exception. To young Michael, the journey ahead will reunite him
with his mother at the other end of the world. And metaphorically, it is a journey that
contours the construction of a subjectivity in its embryo phase by measuring the
transforming power of human interaction, cultural difference and the cultivation of
cosmopolitan empathy.
To a certain extent, what Ondaatje experiments in this cosmopolitan
Bildungsroman is a new proposition that draws heavily upon his earlier works: a
transposition that is not defined by a set of fixed cultural norms. Rather, this fluid
state of being is experienced in the process of interacting with others. Though the
process does not last, its impact stays. The world we are living in is characteristic of
the confluence of different cultures. The nomadic experience of traversing from one
culture to another has the potential to deduce the effects of local affiliations. But the
novel is by no means a promotion of a rootless cosmopolitanism.
Though scared of the darkness and the vastness of the sea, young Michael
expresses a mixed feeling towards the unknown voyage that lies ahead, “half wanting
to pull myself back, half desiring to leap towards it” (CT 46). As the ship navigates in
the sea, Michael navigates through the differences well.
Michael is immersed in otherness on the ship. To begin with, his two companions
Ramadhin and Cassius differ overtly in their personality. “The first was quiet, the
other looked scornful” (CT 10). But the three boys manage to forge a special bond in
spite of their contradictions. The boys are extremely curious about the hustle and
bustle of the Arabic world. They even marvel at an orange thrown to them from

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ashore “An orange from the desert” (CT 177). Since they have been eating European
food on the ship for so long, when they see a canteen cook beside an open fire
roasting something. They find that its “odour was a gift, a desire in the night, a
temptation to abandon the ship” (CT 178). The culinary difference between European
food and Arabic food is a neutral comparison drawn from physical preference with no
ideology involved. The small detail embodies Ondaatje’s genuine concern about a
cosmopolitan perspective towards difference.
During the journey, Michael and his two companions simply go on adventures on
the ship without ever reflecting how one has influenced another. But in hindsight, the
present-day Michael recognizes their impact on him: “I suppose he changed me
during those twenty-one days, persuading me to interpret anything that took place
around us with his quizzical or upside-down perspective” (CT 55).
The novel also shows that interactions with others does not always mean
opportunities. It can be dangerous as well. A Baron traveling in the first class lures
Michael to his cabin with cakes and tea. The Baron then takes advantage of Michael’s
innocence and uses him as his accomplice in his petty theft. Later the escape of the
criminal even puts Emily in great danger. However, the dangers on the ship embody a
great moment for the cultivation of cosmopolitan empathy. In a letter to Michael after
the voyage, Miss Lasqueti discloses an effort of hers that Michael and Emily do not
know back then. Knowing that the Baron is taking advantage of Michael, she has
invited Michael to her cabin for tea to simply remove him “from the clutches of the
Baron” (CT 296). Miss Lasqueti has also invited Emily that day. In fact, it is Emily
who “should have wanted to save” (CT 296). Because she has noticed that Emily
spends time with the Jankla Troupe chap and “her relationship with him seemed
fraught and dangerous” (CT 296).
The larger point here is not that Michael acknowledges signs of transformation,
but that the process of transformation of his subjectivity only becomes powerful in the
cosmos where different perspectives are available. In other words, the ship has the
potential to become a cosmopolitan community that does not identify Michael as “An
Asian polecat, a loathsome little Asian polecat” (CT 130). The captain’s outrageous
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yet attitude towards Michael is echoed in the real world. Though they sometimes
sneak into the pool which is accessible exclusively to the first-class travelers, Michael
and his two companions explore mostly marginal places on the ship: including the
turbine room, the secret garden. Their status as their table’s name suggests is
“minimal” whereas people at the Captain’s Table are “constantly toasting each other’s
significant” (CT 103). Michael claims that “What is interesting and important happens
mostly in secret, in places where there is no power” (CT 103). The small lesson he
learns exemplifies that the marginal space is actually the most animating soil to breed
cosmopolitanism. For people in power “glide along the familiar rut they have made
for themselves” (CT 103). The ruts refer to the boundaries they have created to sustain
their power and status. The subtle and nuanced psychological changes that happen to
Michael and other characters are revealed by the switch of narrative. It allows the
reader to connect the dots in a chronological fashion and piece together various
aspects of the same character or event.
Michael, Cassius and Ramadhin start their adventurous exploration with innocent
deeds that children would usually do when they are not under parental supervision.
They have figured out a schedule of their own based on their observation of hustle
and bustle on the ship. For example, they have discovered “this late-night schedule for
the prisoner’s walk” (CT 19) so the three of them are often there at that hour. In
addition, they would try out various deeds. For example, Cassius “was eager that we
should try to smoke the whole chair before the end of our journey” (CT 25).
The autonomy of the three pre-adolescent characters reflects that their perception
of the world is a subjective process. However, their seemingly anarchic state is
actually limited because they are sailing in the cultural and social waters dominated
by adults. The course of Michael’s life is shaped by the historical migration from Sri
Lanka to England. The contours of his life on the ship are partially drawn by the adult
characters.
But as they are involved deeper in the adult world, they are exposed to a much
darker and more complicated realm of the world: there is a prisoner on board. Rumor
has it that he has murdered an English person, which explains why he is sent to
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England for trial under heavy guard. The three boys learn about the nocturnal walk
the authorities have arranged for the prisoner. They start off as observers. But as the
plot unfolds, they gradually get involved in the escape the prisoner intricately plans.
Michael’s cousin Emily is even put in danger because of the escape. In fact, Michael
is not the only one to have been transformed by the incidents that happen on board.
Later, the reader would find out, passengers such as Cassius, Emily and Miss Lasqueti
are all deeply influenced by the series of vignettes.
During the journey, the three boys “had no real interest in one another’s
background” (CT 54). Cassius, who “never referred to his parents”, suggests that they
keep their backgrounds to themselves. This arrangement is actually a move that acts
as shield of preconceived expectations. Ondaatje’s understanding of identity as
represented in most of his novels is open-ended. And The Cat’s Table is a thorough
practice of such structure of thought. Young Michael constructs his subjectivity in
response to the plurality of influences that exist on the ship. His subjectivity is
transforming from singular to plural and his identity kaleidoscopic.
Cassius’s name is obviously implying a Western connotation. Michael thus
describes Cassius in the novel “There was a gentle democracy in Cassius. In
retrospect, he was only against the power of Caesar” (CT 55). The association is
self-evident. Ondaatje links his Cassius to the Roman senator Gaius Cassius Longinus,
who was a prime instigator in the conspiracy against Julius Caesar. Given that the
fictional Ramadhin is a Muslim, his name is likely to be a variation of the Arabic
name “Ramadan”, which means ninth Islamic month. Patell suggests that
“Cosmopolitanism is best understood… as a structure of thought, a perspective that
embraces difference…” (Patell 8). This agrees with Ondaatje’s representation of
cultural interactions in this novel. Appiah focuses on the idea of “conversation… in its
older meaning of living together”, as Michael’s conversations with others show that
new selves can emerge through negotiation. Certain conversations in the novel
address the difference between the East and the West. An entire chapter is dedicated to
the Suez Canal, which on the map is “narrow eye of the needle” (CT 174). It serves as
the linking point between the West and the East. The three boys gaze at an Arab
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harbor pilot, who is in charge of taking Oronsay into “even shallower waters and
adjust the angle of the ship so we (they) could slip into the narrower canal” (CT 174).
The Arab pilot distinguishes himself because he moves on the ship “ignoring all
authority around him” in the eyes of “the Captain and two other officers” (CT 174).
The European liner has to follow the rules on the Arabian Peninsula.
But as aforementioned, Ondaatje has always wanted to transcend the binary
opposites of post-colonial context. The novel is also full of negotiations on a more
universal level to dissolve the demarcation between these two opposites. From
Colombo to Port Aden, every Eastern place Michael reaches on the journey is a
strange land to him. By enlarging Michael’s strange feeling towards these Eastern
places, the writer manages to deconstructs the alleged idea that the East is a
monolithic unity. Western readers are thus invited to re-evaluate their concept of
difference and otherness. Boarding the European liner represents an initial move
towards a state characteristic of being “almost the same, but not quite”, using
Bhabha’s words. My interpretation of this state focuses on the process rather than the
result, which means here it is studied as a cosmopolitan transposition rather than a
post-colonial mimicry.7
Ondaatje’s cosmopolitan practice in his novels does not aim to break down or
shatter borders. On the contrary, Ondaatje respects borders. What he thinks little of is
the boundaries produced by these borders. Ondaatje’s characters manage to free their
mental capacity and cross-cultural borders by transcending them. During his journey
to the West, young Michael seeks to bridge an understanding between the West and
the East, between the self and the other.
The Cat’s Table is concerned with re-imagining and re-negotiating the boundaries
and hierarchies of both Western and global grand narratives. Through literary
imagination, Ondaatje constructs spatial milieus where the reader is invited to engage
in interrogations over these boundaries.
The voyage is first and foremost a geographical journey, which takes him around

7
Homi K. Bhabha defines mimicry as “one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial
power and knowledge” (Bhabha 85).

118
many cultural landmarks: Colombo, Port Aden, Port Said and London. By
emphasizing every stop on the way and zoom in on Michael’s curious reaction to their
cultural independence, Ondaatje breaks down the imperial structure of categorizing
the world as the West and the Rest. To a certain extent, it reestablishes a cosmopolitan
theorization of “difference”.
Given that Cassius has witnessed the tragic escape in which the deaf girl
disappears into the sea, whom he is empathetic with, the present-day Michael
presumed that Cassius has “lost the rest of his childhood on the ship that night” (CT
361). Cassius has transformed into a teenager who “could rely on no one and believe
in nothing” (CT 361). “An artist with burned hands” (360), Cassius has become “a
belligerent force in the art scene” (CT 361).
Michael acknowledges that it is because the quiet kindness that he has drawn
from Ramadhin that he thinks of approaching Cassius now. Cassius shows mercy to
the deaf girl Asuntha; Ramadhin wishes to protect Heather Cave while Michael
intends to look out for Emily. All the three boys, each with his own desire to “protect
others seemingly less secure that ourselves” (CT 361), have cultivated a cosmopolitan
empathy during the voyage.
It is through the cultivation of empathy that Michael both transforms his
subjectivity and re-imagines the boundaries that he has transcended. Because of his
innocence and openness, there is space on the ship where the patriarchal structures
and the current social taxonomy do not prevail. He thus continues to adventure, to
traverse, to contest, to converse and to reconstruct both his subjectivity and his world.
Ondaatje also rejects the concept of chronological narrative in this novel.
However, this time his narrative is different from the other three novels studied here.
The narrative unfolds in the form of cyclicity. This study interprets the fragmented
narrative not through the postmodern lens. Rather, it is read it as an artistic creation
which resembles ocean current that is known for its fluidity. The reader is thus led and
encouraged to piece together the fragmented vignettes and shift from the past to the
present to make sense of the story. By doing so, Ondaatje powerfully recreates the
construction of a cosmopolitan subjectivity.
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 But Ondaatje does not really offer closures in the novel. Their transformation of
self is still in working progress. We can see that the novel conveys a new
understanding of cosmopolitanism as a structure of thought towards difference instead
of being a solution that can be used to eliminate difference.
As for the temporal community formed on the ship, it is not a coherent one.
There is little sense of belonging for Michael and other characters. To put more
precisely, they are confined in the same space because they have to. It is not a
voluntary gathering of people. It is hardly the cosmopolitan community that we have
discussed in earlier chapters. Like the mainstream society, racism, hostile attitude
towards difference still exist on the Oronsay. Its merits lie in its potential contribution
to the cultivation of cosmopolitan empathy. In the epoch of ever increasing global
integration, the problem of solidarity arises with certain urgency. According to
Hollinger, solidarity is “an experience of willed affiliation” (Hollinger 91). There is a
large number of norms to be taken into consideration, such as nationality, ethnicity,
economic position, ideology, religion and gender, etc. The questions of how much you
owe to our own kind and others based on these claims requires us to deal with “the
problem of solidarity” (Hollinger 91). There is no single formula for every situation
where “a variety of overlapping and sometimes competing affiliations is at issue”
(Hollinger 92).
Ondaatje narrates a voyage that transcends many boundaries—gender, religion,
culture in The Cat’s Table. Through his intricate and poetic account, the novel contests
the boundaries that the West has set for the rest of the world and the patriarchal
society has set for the female. Ondaatje’s ultimate goal is not to be confined to
reimagine these boundaries. Rather, he is making a bigger effort in his works: that is
to encourage conversations over how to cultivate a perspective that regards
differences as opportunities.
Cosmopolitan perspective entails relationships to a plurality of cultures. It entails
“first of all an orientation, a willingness to engage with the Other” (CT 13).
Cosmopolitanism here is perceived as a structure of thought that encourages the
cultivation of an openness towards various cultural experiences. The cast of
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passengers and crew form a loosely connected community on the ship. This
community lasts only for three weeks. By calling the community a cosmopolitan
community we do not mean it is a utopian where differences do not cause problems. A
cosmopolitan community is a community that encourages conversations over and
interactions with others so that they can break down the boundaries caused by their
differences. In addition, the novel is keen to cultivate cosmopolitan empathy, as it
highly values this virtue. It is in this sense that the ship can be seen as a micro cosmos
which mirrors the cosmos that we live in and sheds light on the possibility and
difficulty of building a Community of Shared Future.
Deconstruction of center, the fragmented and the nonlinear narrative is a
characteristic feature of typical postmodernist fiction. However, few writers could
manage to provide a constructive perspective, if not a solution, while disclosing the
piling of wreckages of the postmodern society. Ondaatje, being one of the greatest
Canadian and cosmopolitan writers, is consistent with his exploration of how people
of different social backgrounds interact with each other. His works point out a
potential direction.
Ondaatje teaches us how to face the catastrophic status quo in a proper way. And
most importantly, he has enlightened us with his aesthetically and thematically
brilliant novels. Drawing upon certain overlaps with post-colonialism and
postmodernism, and through the lens of cosmopolitanism, we have studied the novel
as a cosmopolitan Bildungsroman, which transcends the binary opposites that it aims
to dissolve. By analyzing The Cat’s Table as both travel writing and Bildungsroman,
this chapter has examined its representation of cosmopolitan subjectivity and
community, thus revealing the author’s intention to articulate his concern for the
dividedness of the world and promote the cultivation of cosmopolitanism.

121
 Conclusion
Drawing upon previous researches, this dissertation closely and systematically
explores the issue of cosmopolitanism in Michael Ondaatje’s four representative
novels, providing a new dimension for Ondaatje’s study. The dissertation has
unraveled Ondaatje’s larger vision which transcends binary opposites of post-colonial
studies. Each chapter deals with a distinctive yet interconnected topic: the cultivation
of cosmopolitan self in In the Skin of a Lion; rootless cosmopolitanism in The English
Patient; rooted cosmopolitanism in Anil’s Ghost; a cosmopolitan Bildungsroman in
The Cat’s Table. The texts are studied in a chronological fashion as Ondaatje’s
cosmopolitan vision has been evolved with time. The ensemble of the four variations
creates a powerful polyphonic that offers us an alternative to approach differences as
opportunities rather than problems to be solved. Ondaatje’s genuine concern for the
humanity as a whole is reflected in his consistent effort in the cultivation of
cosmopolitan empathy in his literary imagination.
The first chapter examines the construction of the cosmopolitan self in
Ondaatje’s first cubist fiction In the Skin of a Lion. We have scrutinized the
construction of subjectivity of Patrick, whose true identity remains intentionally
nebulous in the beginning. The kind of self that Patrick forms in relation to
interactions with strangers is what Hall terms “the cosmopolitan self”. While
acknowledging the attachment to our cultural roots, the cosmopolitan self that
Ondaatje creates is able to navigate through cultural confluences in societies that are
becoming “increasingly multiple in their nature” (Hall 2008: 25). By building a
tension between Patrick’s inability to narrate and desire for conversation, Ondaatje
enhances the potential of interpersonal interactions and lays groundwork for the
cultivation of empathy. By recreating the multicultural social milieu of Toronto in the
historiography, Ondaatje expounds culture contact from below. Gaining his aesthetic
vision from the silenced and marginalized workers demonstrates his deep concern for
and genuine appreciation of the poor. By revealing the suffering of these immigrant
laborers, Ondaatje incisively critiques existing racism and inequality of multicultural

122
societies. The chapter reflects upon the strength and power of the transcultural and
transnational immigrant laborers, which embodies a strong defense for the charge that
“cosmopolitanism represents an “elite” point of view” (Patell 13).
Though multiculturalism respects cultural difference, multiculturalists are
reluctant to engage in cross-cultural conversations that deal with problems caused by
these differences. Ondaatje keenly observes the ill logic of multiculturalism, creating
a white man who “wants conversation” (SL 10) with strangers. Ondaatje compares the
trope of donning the skin of a lion with shouldering moral obligations for others. But
it is not in the next novel that he examines an alternative structure of thought, rootless
cosmopolitanism, to approach difference.
Focusing on his depiction of a ruined villa in Italy at present and deserts in
Africa in the past, the second chapter presents a more thorough discussion of
Ondaatje’s critique of nationalism and rootless cosmopolitanism in The English
Patient.
In terms of the narrative structure of the novel, Ondaatje innovatively uses
Almásy’s memory as “a main narrative device” (Lobnik 73). The elusive nature of the
concept and the nomadic desert travels in his memories dissolve demarcations
between nations and cultures. The violence reveals Ondaatje’s pessimistic conception
of history. Echoing Walter Benjamin’s elaboration of Angelus Nous, the angel of
history who gazes at “the pile of debris” (Benjamin 258), Ondaatje questions whether
the underlying reason for war is because of nation. Zeno’s notion of rootless
cosmopolitan serves as a reference point for the analysis of Ondaatje’s presentation of
the tension between Almásy and Kip. At first glance Ondaatje appears to promote the
idea of a rootless cosmopolitan, or what Almásy terms “international bastard” (EP
188). Ondaatje questions and undermines the ideologically biased gap between the
civilized West and the barbaric East, as the novel creates a social milieu where the
cultural other Kip is not seen as a racialized subject. Ondaatje deconstructs binaries of
postcolonial discourse and engages the four members in cross-cultural conversations
that multiculturalists would have avoided.
Ondaatje experiments his idea of building a cosmopolitan community that is
123
tightly associated with reading. The community formed by the cast of traumatized
members offers a new model for community studies. It differs drastically from
Anderson Benedict’s conceptualization of nation as “imagined political community”
(Anderson 6). While nation emphasizes on a universal past, the cosmopolitan
community Ondaatje depicts in the novel is to confront a catastrophic present and
strive for a shared future. Ondaatje’s innovative proposal would be of great value for
the discussion of building a Community of Shared Future.
Ondaatje is doubtful of nation, but at the same time he is suspicious of rootless
cosmopolitanism. The epiphany that Kip experiences when he learns about the atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, together with his disillusion of universalism,
leads to the study of Anil’s Ghost, in which Ondaatje returns to the war-torn Sri Lanka.
He launches an even more sensitive project on bridging gaps between cultural and
ideological difference.
To begin with, Ondaatje has broadened his border-crossing routes as his
character navigates through sexual difference in Anil’s Ghost. The implied incest and
the patriarchal pressure Anil experiences in the construction of her identity render her
the antithesis of Spivak’s conceptualization of “subaltern woman”.
After expounding the construction of identity, the dissertation responds to some
criticisms that Anil’s Ghost is ahistorical for its lack of political engagement. In
contrast, this chapter proposes that Anil’s Ghost is a key site where Ondaatje carries
on his exploration of nationalism and the politics of identity.
Ondaatje rejects to view Sri Lanka with “a long-distance gaze” (AG 11) because
he understands the complicacy of this issue. The research on the history of the tension
between Sinhalese and Tamil in this chapter would contribute to the discussion of the
novel, especially for readers and critics who are not familiar with the historical
background of Sri Lanka. The detour that Ondaatje takes with his political
engagement does not mean he is “turning away from atrocity” (Scanlan 302). To
Ondaatje, the priority should be about healing of wounds.
Ondaatje carries on his exploration of the relationship between cultural roots and
cosmopolitanism. When Sarath accepts that Anil “is finally us” (AG 272), Ondaatje
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means that Anil becomes what Appiah terms rooted cosmopolitanism. That these
binaries are interchangeable is precisely Ondaatje’s point. This moves beyond the
binary discourse of postcolonial literature, encouraging transnational and
cross-cultural conversations to break down biased preconceptions between the West
and the East.
Chapter Four studies The Cat’s Table as a cosmopolitan Bildungsroman in its
consideration of how Ondaatje, through children’s literature, is using the barely
imprinted adolescent narrator as a trope to dramatize the process of constructing the
cosmopolitan self and enhance the cultivation of empathy in his fiction writing.
Reading it as a Bildungsroman and travel literature, this chapter traces a young
man’s three-week journey, zooming in on the transposition he experiences on the ship
and its impact on him in his adulthood. Young Michael is influenced and even shaped
in the course of his voyage when he interacts with strangers, especially with the cast
of marginal characters gathered at the cat’s table. Their presence functions as “true
kaleidoscope” (Alghamdi 1), through which young Michael is exposed to a cultural
plurality he would eventually embrace. As an initiation story, the novel endeavors to
explore the initiation of the dialectics of difference in a meta sense, as Mr. Mazappa
suggests to Michael that “this voyage would be a great education” (CT 11). The
inclusion of music, movie and reading reinforces Ondaatje’s faith in the constructive
role that art can play in improving our understanding of difference. Hence, the
microcosmos formed on the ship sheds light on the building of a Community of
Shared Future.
By using a genre that has been linked with modern nationalism in his
cosmopolitan literary project, Ondaatje enlarges his long effort in the representation
of cosmopolitanism in his novels.
To conclude, my argument in the dissertation in many ways is about the
achievement of Ondaatje’s postmodern narrative, but it follows a very different
trajectory. Reading against previous researches on Ondaatje’s self-reflexive cubist
style, this dissertation focuses on the effects that Ondaatje’s noted fragmentary and
ambivalent structure exerts on the discussion and cultivation of cosmopolitanism.
125
Merging the study of literary form and content, this study clarifies the demarcation
between literary criticism and interdisciplinary studies with an emphatic gaze at the
literariness in relation to cultural-social studies.
The dissertation has recognized Ondaatje’s perseverance in experimenting an
alternative structure of thought towards difference. Though often categorized as a
post-colonial writer, Ondaatje never ceases to break the ideologically and culturally
biased preconceptions of Self and Other for his readers. From the critique of
multiculturalism to the hesitant proposal of rootless cosmopolitanism and lastly the
rooted cosmopolitanism, Ondaatje’s conceptualization of cosmopolitanism has
evolved with time. The desire for interrogation and conversation of his characters
plants a budding seed in his readers. Ondaatje’s genuine concern for humanity as a
whole is as powerful a remedy as any political project.
In addition, the genealogy of cosmopolitanism in the dissertation traces back the
origin of the concept and offers an update of its current debates, clarifying its
confusing history and shedding light on what we as Chinese scholars can contribute to
the discussion.
It is hoped this dissertation, with the objective to render comprehension of
Ondaatje’s cosmopolitan representation and appreciation of his unique aesthetics, will
prove useful to future studies of Ondaatje.

126
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