Chiaroscuro The English Patient
PRESENTATION ON CHIAROSCURO: The English Patient by M. Ondaatje
I will talk about the use of chiaroscuro in The English Patient. First, I will speak about the character of Caravaggio in connection with the painter. Then, I will make a realistic reading of chiaroscuro, giving concrete examples of chiaroscuro effect in the text. Finally, I will make a more symbolic reading of Chiaroscuro in the novel as a whole.
THE THIEF AND THE PAINTER
According to Bachelar, fire encompasses contradictions: heaven and hell, good and evil, hot and cold, love and hatred, etc. On page 23 of « La Psychanalyse du Feu » it is written: “Parmi tous les phénomènes, il [le feu] est vraiment le seul qui puisse recevoir aussi nettement les deux valorisations: le …show more content…
bien et le mal. Il brille au Paradis. Il brûle en Enfer. Il est douceur et torture.” The contradictory but complementary elements that we mostly encounter in The English Patient and Butterfly Burning are light and darkness in the form of chiaroscuro.
The English Patient’s setting is a very special world → the use of chiaroscuro creates a dramatic effect which emphasizes the particularity of such a space where characters defy fixed citizenship or the constraints of law: they are new immigrants, political agitators, outlaws, saboteurs, spies, and thieves. Caravaggio, a thief turned into a spyis described by Hanna as being "in a time of darkness" (65): “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.” Caravaggio is part of the criminal underworld, and the whole story is set in a time of darkness: World War II.
→ But what is the link between the character and the painter? Does the thief reflect the painter’s figure or work in a specific way? At the beginning we don’t really know. At one point in the novel the thief is talking to the English patient, and the English patient says, “’David Caravaggio – an absurd name for you, of course”( 116). What does he mean by that? Of course, the thief is not an artist except in the art of robbery.
The painter Caravaggio lived an extravagant and violent life. He was repeatedly in trouble, arrested for assault, libel (= diffamation), using foul language to the police. He even murdered a man called Renuccio Tomassoni and was condemned to death. In the next few months (while hiding from the police), he painted the second of his three “Davids” to which Ondaatje directly refers in the text: "There's a painting by Caravaggio, done late in his life. David with the Head of Goliath. In it, the young warrior holds at the end of his outstretched arm the head of Goliath, ravaged and old. But that is not the true sadness in the picture. It is assumed that the face of David is a portrait of the youthful Caravaggio and the head of Goliath is a portrait of him as an older man, how he looked when he did the painting. Youth judging age at the end of its outstretched hand. The judging of one's own mortality..." →IMAGE
= only direct allusion to the painter
It could be assumed that the thief, like the painter, has a passionate temper. He is actually “boiling" inside. He is in a ferment because the demons of his past life haunt him. He wants to take revenge over Almazy who has denounced him to German authorities. As Baudriar says, revenge is like an inner fire in the sense that both can be contained in material, as something latent in one’s heart (pp. 23): “Il [le feu] redescend dans la matière et se cache, latent, comme la haine et la vengeance.” In this perspective, we can link Caravaggio with the element of fire by saying that his thirst for revenge acts upon him like an inner fire.
Like the painter, he also had a violent and tumultuous life.
He also planned to murder a man. Caravaggio answers the English Patient’s critic about his name by saying “’At least I have a name” (116). This seems contradictory to what had happened in chapter two, when instead of telling Hanna his name, Caravaggio just writes down his serial number so that she knows that he is with the Allies. Like Almazy, it is as if he no longer truly has a name or an identity. Because he was a thief, and then he lost his thumbs doing war work, it is as if he is no longer human. The war has taken his name, his identity, and way of …show more content…
life.
The darkness if his personality comes from war as it is clearly said on page 124 when Hanna says : “He had lived through a time of war when everything offered up to those around him was a lie. He had felt like a man in the darkness of a room imitating the calls of a bird.”
However, at the end, he forgives the English Patient’s betrayal and he seems finally to recover some peace. Throughout the novel, his “inner darkness” has been diminishing thanks to his friendship with Hanna, Kip and ultimately, Almazy. In this perspective, Caravaggio, like other characters, could be seen as the symbol of chiaroscuro: he is part of a time of darkness (World War II) and possesses a dark past, full of violence and suffering, but ends up in enlightenment and renewal.
I. REALISTIC READING OF CHIAROSCURO
The English Patient is a very cinematographic narrative → we find examples of chiaroscuro throughout the text. Mostly, when Hanna reads to Almazy by candlelight. It is interesting to note that in an interview between M. Ondaatje and the actor Daniel Dafoe (who interpreted Caravaggio in the movie The English Patient), the writer tells him : “What's interesting is if I'm writing a scene in the patient's room and it's from Hana's point of view, I see about three feet, as if with a small light. She's reading a book and she sees the floor. And the patient's over here and Caravaggio is over there. But I never really get a sense of the whole room and everything in it. It's almost black and white spotlights in an odd way.” → When the scene is seen from Hana’s point of view, the setting is most likely to be a fragmented white and black landscape.
→while reading, the only thing Hana sees of Almazy is his shiny eyes in the darkness → p. 19: “She looked up from the book and sees his eyes on her. He begins to talk across the darkness.”
→ Candlelight enhances the opposition between Hanna (young, healthy, who represents life) who stands in the light and Almazy (dying man, who represents death) who stands in the shadow. This opposition creates a dramatic effect.
→ Almazy’s burned body appears as a darkness contrasting with the white sheet of the bed and his skin is described in terms of fire. On page 219: the ladybird on Hana’s hand leaves her and moves onto Almazy’s dark skin: “Avoiding the sea of white sheet, it [the ladybird] begins to make the long trek towards the distance of the rest of his body, a bright redness against what seems like volcanic flesh.” → there is an opposition between water (“the sea of sheet”) and fire (“volcanic flesh”).
In the same interview, Ondaatje says that he purposedly removes some elements of the background so that the reader is concentrating on Hana's emotional state. The candlelight isolates Hana from the rest of the room and draws the reader’s attention to her since she is in the spotlight. As Bachelar says when talking about the relation between dreaming and fire, fire involves a centering of the object. We follow the fire and we are at one with it, naturally in a way. → (pp. 36-37) : « Cette rêverie est extrêmement différente du rêve pour cela même qu’elle est toujours plus ou moins centrée sur un objet. » In the text, the fire of the candlelight not only operates on the reader by drawing his/her attention to Hanna, but also on Hanna who becomes a more intellectual character through the act of reading. In other words, the intellectual dimension of fire (the connection between the mind and fire) appears through the act of reading.
There is this very funny scene where naked Caravaggio tries to steal a camera while a couple is making love and the woman discovers him because of the light of a car (p. 39): “A car beams [and] lights up the room” where Caravaggio stands “half turned in surprise at the light that reveals his body in the darkness. The car lights sweep up into a corner of the room and disappear. Then there is blackness.”
→ chiaroscuro effect + association of the camera with fire and water in darkness (closely related to fire because it is light caught on a piece of paper)
Then another scene with Caravaggio and Hana on p. 234: “Caravaggio lay on the carpet at the far end of the library. From his darkness it seemed that Hana’s left arm was raw phosphorus, lighting the books, reflecting redness onto her dark hair, burning against the cotton of her frock and its puffed sleeve at her shoulder.”
→sharp contrast between light and shadow and the light is expressed in terms of fire
There is also an effect of chiaroscuro when Almazy falls in love with Katharine Clifton, when she borrows his copy of The Histories and reads aloud the story of King Candaules, the king's beautiful wife, and the servant Gyges around a campfire. Everybody is sitting around the strong illuminating fire and is surrounded by darkness, like a little spot of light in the immensity of the dark desert. In this specific setting, Katharine’s words seem to have a greater impact upon the English patient than it would have in the daylight. The fact “she spoke across the fire” (247) makes her look and speak differently. It is as if her words were material objects that physically impregnate with fire, and that they hit him like an arrow.
→ Obviously, here, fire operates as an awakener of desire/love → According to Baudriar, electric fire awakes sexual desire (pp. 55): « Tout ce qui frotte, tout ce qui brûle, tout ce qui électrise est immédiatement susceptible d’expliquer la génération. » → even though, here, it is not electric but natural fire, it has the same effect upon the characters.
- Kip is the character who is the one most sensitive to art: Kip finds sanctuary in immobile works of art at the center of colonial occupations and war - that have turned him into a soldier of the British army and drawn him from one battle to the next across Europe. The admiration of statues becomes an attempt to arrest the violent dislocations of war. He retreats from the war by looking at sculpture and fresco, works of art whose weight or assimilation with the plaster of a wall protected them from looting armies because they were nearly impossible to seize. → Kip turns to statues of people and angels, because "it was essential to remain still" (103). He joins a "race of stones," every night choosing a sculpted figure to be his "sentinel". Kip rests his eyes on Piero della Francesca's Queen of Sheba, Michelangelo's Isaiah, and the sculpture of the Virgin Mary that is carried from the sea by the people of Gabicce Mare because they show him the vanity and impermanence of conquest. The people of Gabicce Mare have "survived the Fascists, the English, Gauls, Goths and Germans. They had been owned so often it meant nothing" (84). This is precisely why they perform the Marine Festival of the Virgin even in the middle of war. The old ceremony defies the arrogance of the latest invader, and the plaster figure of the Virgin seems to transcend the passage of time and the distinctions of culture. Kip contemplates the icon through the gun sights of his rifle and observes that the statue's face is "ageless, without sexuality" (79). In this pale face Kirpal Singh, the Sikh from India, sees the unexpected likeness of "someone he knew. A sister. Someday a daughter" (80). Peering down the gun that he was given to kill his enemies and defend his confederates, Kip experiences propinquity (proximity, contiguity), the habit of perception that Almasy believed to be sharpest in the desert. When viewed through the telescopic sights of a gun, the Virgin appears to draw near to Kip, and her carved face grows familiar, as though the face of kin.
→There is a striking Chiaroscuro effect in this scene when Kipp and other soldiers are looking at the Sistine Chapel under a huge vault and one of them asks more light to see the paintings in the Great Hall (pp. 82-85): “And one of them had said, “Damn. Maybe more light, Sergant Shand?” And the sergeant released the catch of the flare and held it up in his outstretched arm, the Niagara of light pouring off his fist, and stood there for the length of its burn like that. The rest of them stood looking up at the figures and faces cowded onto the ceiling that emerged in the light.”
On next page, using a military flare for light, Kip hoists himself up to the ceiling until he can approach the Queen of Sheba and touch her painted neck with his hands (pp. 82-83). By light made for war, and through the lenses of binoculars and guns, Kip studies faces contours and expressions as if reading a map. He recognizes familiar faces…
II. SYMBOLIC READING OF CHIAROSCURO
Chiaroscuro reminds us of the various oppositions we encounter in the book as a whole, such as:
1) Probably farfetched → Chiaroscuro as a metaphor of black printed words on a white page (white = blank space between the lines, and black = printed words).
→ what is the connection between reading and writing in books and the forms of national violence, namely war and colonialism, that obsess The English Patient?
→ Hanna and Almazy resist war by handwriting, the act of handwriting becomes an attempt to arrest the violent dislocations of war. Hanna covers print with handwriting: Hana opens The Last of the Mohicans and composes a paragraph to describe the arrival of her father's friend Caravaggio, who is "in a time of darkness," and then conceals the novel "in one of the [library's] high shelves" (61); Almazy excises pages from a The Histories of Herodotus and turns a standard edition into a private idiosyncrasy. → print must be understood as a "mobile technology of power". According to Eisenstein, the printing of old manuscripts and new discoveries in "easily portable form" facilitated the rapid advancement of scientific thought during and after the sixteenth century. → unlike print, however, cryptography attempts to create writing that is legible only to the trusted conspirator, and its success depends on the strict delimitation of its readership. During the Second World War the Allies instructed the spies to choose and memorize several verses of a memorable poem, in whose jumbled words messages could be concealed and transmitted. Cf. “Rebecca” by Daphné Du Maurier used as a spy code → printed words as a war weapon, as a mean of social/political control and power. As Caravaggio explains to Hana, the printed word played such an important role in European intelligence through out the war that when Rommel's spy Johann Eppler began to use Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca as a codebook, sending messages to Germany from North Africa on the placement and movement of troops, the novel "became bedside reading with British Intelligence" (174) until they mastered the code and could pick out the enciphered transmissions.
→ printed words as a link between past and present: contemporary history and ancient history that links up with the book of Herodotus: it is because he finds in Herodotus a man who loves the desert that the "English" patient is so taken with the Histories: "There is, after Herodotus, little interest by the Western world towards the desert for hundreds of years. From 425 BC to the beginning of the twentieth century there is an averting of eyes" (133). He is so identified with Herodotus that he almost seems to consider himself as his posthumous editor. → Almasy places his copy of The Histories. He leaves his lover illumined by ancient color and guarded by a history of the ancient empires, in the hope that this magic will protect her from time and death.
2) Chiaroscuro as a metaphor of the opposition between the desert (sun, fire & air → airplane crash; something “wild”) and the garden (earth & water, grass → something domesticated, “colonized”).
The desert is characterized by water: Almazy echoes such a perspective when he speaks of the desert as an "old sea" (22), "Show me a desert, as you would show another man a river, or another man the metropolis of his childhood" (240). The desert is the space without boundaries, nations, or cities. It is a space that resists being divided up artificially and resists being tied down by the points on a map. This is the only space in which Almazy feels comfortable, truly himself, truly "at home". Almazy was obsessed with the purifying space of the desert and the power it had to erase national boundaries and
identities:
“By 1932, Bagnold was finished and Madox and the rest of us were everywhere. Looking for the lost army of Cambyses. Looking for Zerzura. 1932 and 1933 and 1934. Not seeing each other for months. Just the Bedouin and us, crisscrossing the forty days Road. There were rivers of desert tribes, the most beautiful humans I've met in my life. We were German, English, Hungarian, African - all of us insignificant to them. Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states. Madox died because of nations. The desert could not be claimed or owned-it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East ... AH of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to re move the clothing of our countries. lt was a place of faith. We dis appeared into landscape. Fire and sand.... Erase the family name! Erase nations! 1 was taught such things by the desert ... I wanted to erase my name and the place 1 had come from. By the time 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.” (138-39)
How fire and water are each other’s negative space? How characters are each other’s negative space?
→ Almazy and Katherine are each other’s negative space: “he meets her in lush gardens despite his antipathy to them: "When he is not in the desert with Madox or with Bermann in the Arab libraries, he meets her in Groppi park-beside the heavily watered plum gardens. She is happiest here. She is a woman who misses moisture, who has always loved low green hedges and ferns. While for him this much greenery feels like a carnival" (153).
The tension between the opposing spaces of the desert and the garden and worldviews they come to figure permeates the whole of the novel. This is one of the important ways that Kip's decision at the end of the novel is prepared for; the lure of the containment and “boundedness” of the garden is present from the very beginning, offering a counter-vision to the vast and unbounded space of the desert. Later, Almazy will reveal to Caravaggio that (236): "Her [Katherine] gardens were the gardens I spoke of when I spoke to you of gardens." But the garden is not a space towards which he has any natural affinity. Caravaggio suggests that the closer he gets to death, the more he is interested in the desert and less in the gardens: "But it is mostly the desert now. The English garden is wearing thin. He's dying. I think you have the spy helper Almasy upstairs" (164). Caravaggio's observation creates an association between the desert and death and be-tween gardens and life.
I will talk about the use of chiaroscuro in The English Patient. First, I will speak about the character of Caravaggio in connection with the painter. Then, I will make a realistic reading of chiaroscuro, giving concrete examples of chiaroscuro effect in the text. Finally, I will make a more symbolic reading of Chiaroscuro in the novel as a whole.
THE THIEF AND THE PAINTER
According to Bachelar, fire encompasses contradictions: heaven and hell, good and evil, hot and cold, love and hatred, etc. On page 23 of « La Psychanalyse du Feu » it is written: “Parmi tous les phénomènes, il [le feu] est vraiment le seul qui puisse recevoir aussi nettement les deux valorisations: le …show more content…
bien et le mal. Il brille au Paradis. Il brûle en Enfer. Il est douceur et torture.” The contradictory but complementary elements that we mostly encounter in The English Patient and Butterfly Burning are light and darkness in the form of chiaroscuro.
The English Patient’s setting is a very special world → the use of chiaroscuro creates a dramatic effect which emphasizes the particularity of such a space where characters defy fixed citizenship or the constraints of law: they are new immigrants, political agitators, outlaws, saboteurs, spies, and thieves. Caravaggio, a thief turned into a spyis described by Hanna as being "in a time of darkness" (65): “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.” Caravaggio is part of the criminal underworld, and the whole story is set in a time of darkness: World War II.
→ But what is the link between the character and the painter? Does the thief reflect the painter’s figure or work in a specific way? At the beginning we don’t really know. At one point in the novel the thief is talking to the English patient, and the English patient says, “’David Caravaggio – an absurd name for you, of course”( 116). What does he mean by that? Of course, the thief is not an artist except in the art of robbery.
The painter Caravaggio lived an extravagant and violent life. He was repeatedly in trouble, arrested for assault, libel (= diffamation), using foul language to the police. He even murdered a man called Renuccio Tomassoni and was condemned to death. In the next few months (while hiding from the police), he painted the second of his three “Davids” to which Ondaatje directly refers in the text: "There's a painting by Caravaggio, done late in his life. David with the Head of Goliath. In it, the young warrior holds at the end of his outstretched arm the head of Goliath, ravaged and old. But that is not the true sadness in the picture. It is assumed that the face of David is a portrait of the youthful Caravaggio and the head of Goliath is a portrait of him as an older man, how he looked when he did the painting. Youth judging age at the end of its outstretched hand. The judging of one's own mortality..." →IMAGE
= only direct allusion to the painter
It could be assumed that the thief, like the painter, has a passionate temper. He is actually “boiling" inside. He is in a ferment because the demons of his past life haunt him. He wants to take revenge over Almazy who has denounced him to German authorities. As Baudriar says, revenge is like an inner fire in the sense that both can be contained in material, as something latent in one’s heart (pp. 23): “Il [le feu] redescend dans la matière et se cache, latent, comme la haine et la vengeance.” In this perspective, we can link Caravaggio with the element of fire by saying that his thirst for revenge acts upon him like an inner fire.
Like the painter, he also had a violent and tumultuous life.
He also planned to murder a man. Caravaggio answers the English Patient’s critic about his name by saying “’At least I have a name” (116). This seems contradictory to what had happened in chapter two, when instead of telling Hanna his name, Caravaggio just writes down his serial number so that she knows that he is with the Allies. Like Almazy, it is as if he no longer truly has a name or an identity. Because he was a thief, and then he lost his thumbs doing war work, it is as if he is no longer human. The war has taken his name, his identity, and way of …show more content…
life.
The darkness if his personality comes from war as it is clearly said on page 124 when Hanna says : “He had lived through a time of war when everything offered up to those around him was a lie. He had felt like a man in the darkness of a room imitating the calls of a bird.”
However, at the end, he forgives the English Patient’s betrayal and he seems finally to recover some peace. Throughout the novel, his “inner darkness” has been diminishing thanks to his friendship with Hanna, Kip and ultimately, Almazy. In this perspective, Caravaggio, like other characters, could be seen as the symbol of chiaroscuro: he is part of a time of darkness (World War II) and possesses a dark past, full of violence and suffering, but ends up in enlightenment and renewal.
I. REALISTIC READING OF CHIAROSCURO
The English Patient is a very cinematographic narrative → we find examples of chiaroscuro throughout the text. Mostly, when Hanna reads to Almazy by candlelight. It is interesting to note that in an interview between M. Ondaatje and the actor Daniel Dafoe (who interpreted Caravaggio in the movie The English Patient), the writer tells him : “What's interesting is if I'm writing a scene in the patient's room and it's from Hana's point of view, I see about three feet, as if with a small light. She's reading a book and she sees the floor. And the patient's over here and Caravaggio is over there. But I never really get a sense of the whole room and everything in it. It's almost black and white spotlights in an odd way.” → When the scene is seen from Hana’s point of view, the setting is most likely to be a fragmented white and black landscape.
→while reading, the only thing Hana sees of Almazy is his shiny eyes in the darkness → p. 19: “She looked up from the book and sees his eyes on her. He begins to talk across the darkness.”
→ Candlelight enhances the opposition between Hanna (young, healthy, who represents life) who stands in the light and Almazy (dying man, who represents death) who stands in the shadow. This opposition creates a dramatic effect.
→ Almazy’s burned body appears as a darkness contrasting with the white sheet of the bed and his skin is described in terms of fire. On page 219: the ladybird on Hana’s hand leaves her and moves onto Almazy’s dark skin: “Avoiding the sea of white sheet, it [the ladybird] begins to make the long trek towards the distance of the rest of his body, a bright redness against what seems like volcanic flesh.” → there is an opposition between water (“the sea of sheet”) and fire (“volcanic flesh”).
In the same interview, Ondaatje says that he purposedly removes some elements of the background so that the reader is concentrating on Hana's emotional state. The candlelight isolates Hana from the rest of the room and draws the reader’s attention to her since she is in the spotlight. As Bachelar says when talking about the relation between dreaming and fire, fire involves a centering of the object. We follow the fire and we are at one with it, naturally in a way. → (pp. 36-37) : « Cette rêverie est extrêmement différente du rêve pour cela même qu’elle est toujours plus ou moins centrée sur un objet. » In the text, the fire of the candlelight not only operates on the reader by drawing his/her attention to Hanna, but also on Hanna who becomes a more intellectual character through the act of reading. In other words, the intellectual dimension of fire (the connection between the mind and fire) appears through the act of reading.
There is this very funny scene where naked Caravaggio tries to steal a camera while a couple is making love and the woman discovers him because of the light of a car (p. 39): “A car beams [and] lights up the room” where Caravaggio stands “half turned in surprise at the light that reveals his body in the darkness. The car lights sweep up into a corner of the room and disappear. Then there is blackness.”
→ chiaroscuro effect + association of the camera with fire and water in darkness (closely related to fire because it is light caught on a piece of paper)
Then another scene with Caravaggio and Hana on p. 234: “Caravaggio lay on the carpet at the far end of the library. From his darkness it seemed that Hana’s left arm was raw phosphorus, lighting the books, reflecting redness onto her dark hair, burning against the cotton of her frock and its puffed sleeve at her shoulder.”
→sharp contrast between light and shadow and the light is expressed in terms of fire
There is also an effect of chiaroscuro when Almazy falls in love with Katharine Clifton, when she borrows his copy of The Histories and reads aloud the story of King Candaules, the king's beautiful wife, and the servant Gyges around a campfire. Everybody is sitting around the strong illuminating fire and is surrounded by darkness, like a little spot of light in the immensity of the dark desert. In this specific setting, Katharine’s words seem to have a greater impact upon the English patient than it would have in the daylight. The fact “she spoke across the fire” (247) makes her look and speak differently. It is as if her words were material objects that physically impregnate with fire, and that they hit him like an arrow.
→ Obviously, here, fire operates as an awakener of desire/love → According to Baudriar, electric fire awakes sexual desire (pp. 55): « Tout ce qui frotte, tout ce qui brûle, tout ce qui électrise est immédiatement susceptible d’expliquer la génération. » → even though, here, it is not electric but natural fire, it has the same effect upon the characters.
- Kip is the character who is the one most sensitive to art: Kip finds sanctuary in immobile works of art at the center of colonial occupations and war - that have turned him into a soldier of the British army and drawn him from one battle to the next across Europe. The admiration of statues becomes an attempt to arrest the violent dislocations of war. He retreats from the war by looking at sculpture and fresco, works of art whose weight or assimilation with the plaster of a wall protected them from looting armies because they were nearly impossible to seize. → Kip turns to statues of people and angels, because "it was essential to remain still" (103). He joins a "race of stones," every night choosing a sculpted figure to be his "sentinel". Kip rests his eyes on Piero della Francesca's Queen of Sheba, Michelangelo's Isaiah, and the sculpture of the Virgin Mary that is carried from the sea by the people of Gabicce Mare because they show him the vanity and impermanence of conquest. The people of Gabicce Mare have "survived the Fascists, the English, Gauls, Goths and Germans. They had been owned so often it meant nothing" (84). This is precisely why they perform the Marine Festival of the Virgin even in the middle of war. The old ceremony defies the arrogance of the latest invader, and the plaster figure of the Virgin seems to transcend the passage of time and the distinctions of culture. Kip contemplates the icon through the gun sights of his rifle and observes that the statue's face is "ageless, without sexuality" (79). In this pale face Kirpal Singh, the Sikh from India, sees the unexpected likeness of "someone he knew. A sister. Someday a daughter" (80). Peering down the gun that he was given to kill his enemies and defend his confederates, Kip experiences propinquity (proximity, contiguity), the habit of perception that Almasy believed to be sharpest in the desert. When viewed through the telescopic sights of a gun, the Virgin appears to draw near to Kip, and her carved face grows familiar, as though the face of kin.
→There is a striking Chiaroscuro effect in this scene when Kipp and other soldiers are looking at the Sistine Chapel under a huge vault and one of them asks more light to see the paintings in the Great Hall (pp. 82-85): “And one of them had said, “Damn. Maybe more light, Sergant Shand?” And the sergeant released the catch of the flare and held it up in his outstretched arm, the Niagara of light pouring off his fist, and stood there for the length of its burn like that. The rest of them stood looking up at the figures and faces cowded onto the ceiling that emerged in the light.”
On next page, using a military flare for light, Kip hoists himself up to the ceiling until he can approach the Queen of Sheba and touch her painted neck with his hands (pp. 82-83). By light made for war, and through the lenses of binoculars and guns, Kip studies faces contours and expressions as if reading a map. He recognizes familiar faces…
II. SYMBOLIC READING OF CHIAROSCURO
Chiaroscuro reminds us of the various oppositions we encounter in the book as a whole, such as:
1) Probably farfetched → Chiaroscuro as a metaphor of black printed words on a white page (white = blank space between the lines, and black = printed words).
→ what is the connection between reading and writing in books and the forms of national violence, namely war and colonialism, that obsess The English Patient?
→ Hanna and Almazy resist war by handwriting, the act of handwriting becomes an attempt to arrest the violent dislocations of war. Hanna covers print with handwriting: Hana opens The Last of the Mohicans and composes a paragraph to describe the arrival of her father's friend Caravaggio, who is "in a time of darkness," and then conceals the novel "in one of the [library's] high shelves" (61); Almazy excises pages from a The Histories of Herodotus and turns a standard edition into a private idiosyncrasy. → print must be understood as a "mobile technology of power". According to Eisenstein, the printing of old manuscripts and new discoveries in "easily portable form" facilitated the rapid advancement of scientific thought during and after the sixteenth century. → unlike print, however, cryptography attempts to create writing that is legible only to the trusted conspirator, and its success depends on the strict delimitation of its readership. During the Second World War the Allies instructed the spies to choose and memorize several verses of a memorable poem, in whose jumbled words messages could be concealed and transmitted. Cf. “Rebecca” by Daphné Du Maurier used as a spy code → printed words as a war weapon, as a mean of social/political control and power. As Caravaggio explains to Hana, the printed word played such an important role in European intelligence through out the war that when Rommel's spy Johann Eppler began to use Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca as a codebook, sending messages to Germany from North Africa on the placement and movement of troops, the novel "became bedside reading with British Intelligence" (174) until they mastered the code and could pick out the enciphered transmissions.
→ printed words as a link between past and present: contemporary history and ancient history that links up with the book of Herodotus: it is because he finds in Herodotus a man who loves the desert that the "English" patient is so taken with the Histories: "There is, after Herodotus, little interest by the Western world towards the desert for hundreds of years. From 425 BC to the beginning of the twentieth century there is an averting of eyes" (133). He is so identified with Herodotus that he almost seems to consider himself as his posthumous editor. → Almasy places his copy of The Histories. He leaves his lover illumined by ancient color and guarded by a history of the ancient empires, in the hope that this magic will protect her from time and death.
2) Chiaroscuro as a metaphor of the opposition between the desert (sun, fire & air → airplane crash; something “wild”) and the garden (earth & water, grass → something domesticated, “colonized”).
The desert is characterized by water: Almazy echoes such a perspective when he speaks of the desert as an "old sea" (22), "Show me a desert, as you would show another man a river, or another man the metropolis of his childhood" (240). The desert is the space without boundaries, nations, or cities. It is a space that resists being divided up artificially and resists being tied down by the points on a map. This is the only space in which Almazy feels comfortable, truly himself, truly "at home". Almazy was obsessed with the purifying space of the desert and the power it had to erase national boundaries and
identities:
“By 1932, Bagnold was finished and Madox and the rest of us were everywhere. Looking for the lost army of Cambyses. Looking for Zerzura. 1932 and 1933 and 1934. Not seeing each other for months. Just the Bedouin and us, crisscrossing the forty days Road. There were rivers of desert tribes, the most beautiful humans I've met in my life. We were German, English, Hungarian, African - all of us insignificant to them. Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states. Madox died because of nations. The desert could not be claimed or owned-it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East ... AH of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to re move the clothing of our countries. lt was a place of faith. We dis appeared into landscape. Fire and sand.... Erase the family name! Erase nations! 1 was taught such things by the desert ... I wanted to erase my name and the place 1 had come from. By the time 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.” (138-39)
How fire and water are each other’s negative space? How characters are each other’s negative space?
→ Almazy and Katherine are each other’s negative space: “he meets her in lush gardens despite his antipathy to them: "When he is not in the desert with Madox or with Bermann in the Arab libraries, he meets her in Groppi park-beside the heavily watered plum gardens. She is happiest here. She is a woman who misses moisture, who has always loved low green hedges and ferns. While for him this much greenery feels like a carnival" (153).
The tension between the opposing spaces of the desert and the garden and worldviews they come to figure permeates the whole of the novel. This is one of the important ways that Kip's decision at the end of the novel is prepared for; the lure of the containment and “boundedness” of the garden is present from the very beginning, offering a counter-vision to the vast and unbounded space of the desert. Later, Almazy will reveal to Caravaggio that (236): "Her [Katherine] gardens were the gardens I spoke of when I spoke to you of gardens." But the garden is not a space towards which he has any natural affinity. Caravaggio suggests that the closer he gets to death, the more he is interested in the desert and less in the gardens: "But it is mostly the desert now. The English garden is wearing thin. He's dying. I think you have the spy helper Almasy upstairs" (164). Caravaggio's observation creates an association between the desert and death and be-tween gardens and life.