(no subject)
Nov. 23rd, 2005 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionSemi-deserved parody of The English Patient, Ondaatje
The character who would never be named looked at the character whose name the author had forgotten for four hours. She caught and crushed several spiders, dropping them neatly down the blouse she had made from a discarded Lithuanian flag. She sighed as hurricane waters soaked her back in that humid chamber without walls. Individual stings of starlight piercing her through the absent ceiling gave the character a confused impression of sad dogs forming a cheerleader pyramid. The mysterious pair who might or might not have sex at any time adjusted themselves on their bed and settee as these spun and tilted in the quaint freefall of that shadowy floorless room.
Ecuador. 1922. He was hissing. His tongue had been cut out during the second peace of the fourth war on the eighth continent but a length of belt he had partially swallowed assumed its role in loquation with moderate success. His teeth were also gone, replaced by hard candies. He had bitten his next-to-last lover's forehead in ecstasy, ignorant of its having been restructured over metal. This lover, who was not a character and therefore did not have the absence of a name, had freed her own brain to the elements so as to rub condiments against it directly, tragically assuming this would sharpen the sensation. I was twenty-five and she was twenty-seven. The Apache had placed a soul jar between us. We took turns standing and spitting into it. The floor grew sadder and sadder. It was grained in kind of a speckles-over-zigzag way. I clutched the telephone so hard it grew into my hand and could not be hung up. I had an okay local plan but the charges were still exorbitant. The dial tone drove her to her mad act of juggling hoses. She eroded before my eyes. When she died she was twenty-four and I was forty-seven.
Two other characters, a nudist epileptic bishop from four obscure European countries and the somber teenaged architect and murderer from Guava, handglode in reminiscing about the battle of the previous day at the carnival in the Himalayas. Lightning struck the toaster, doing something cool to light that reminded all five of them of Ribera. She leaned over him and "got" his nose. Slowly, with implausible simultaneity, they licked one another's scalps. None of the characters, who suddenly had names again, realized they all shared a single birthday.
The character who would never be named looked at the character whose name the author had forgotten for four hours. She caught and crushed several spiders, dropping them neatly down the blouse she had made from a discarded Lithuanian flag. She sighed as hurricane waters soaked her back in that humid chamber without walls. Individual stings of starlight piercing her through the absent ceiling gave the character a confused impression of sad dogs forming a cheerleader pyramid. The mysterious pair who might or might not have sex at any time adjusted themselves on their bed and settee as these spun and tilted in the quaint freefall of that shadowy floorless room.
Ecuador. 1922. He was hissing. His tongue had been cut out during the second peace of the fourth war on the eighth continent but a length of belt he had partially swallowed assumed its role in loquation with moderate success. His teeth were also gone, replaced by hard candies. He had bitten his next-to-last lover's forehead in ecstasy, ignorant of its having been restructured over metal. This lover, who was not a character and therefore did not have the absence of a name, had freed her own brain to the elements so as to rub condiments against it directly, tragically assuming this would sharpen the sensation. I was twenty-five and she was twenty-seven. The Apache had placed a soul jar between us. We took turns standing and spitting into it. The floor grew sadder and sadder. It was grained in kind of a speckles-over-zigzag way. I clutched the telephone so hard it grew into my hand and could not be hung up. I had an okay local plan but the charges were still exorbitant. The dial tone drove her to her mad act of juggling hoses. She eroded before my eyes. When she died she was twenty-four and I was forty-seven.
Two other characters, a nudist epileptic bishop from four obscure European countries and the somber teenaged architect and murderer from Guava, handglode in reminiscing about the battle of the previous day at the carnival in the Himalayas. Lightning struck the toaster, doing something cool to light that reminded all five of them of Ribera. She leaned over him and "got" his nose. Slowly, with implausible simultaneity, they licked one another's scalps. None of the characters, who suddenly had names again, realized they all shared a single birthday.
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-24 12:12 am (UTC)I taught that novel last year and told my students beforehand that there was a lot of sex in the book. Afterwards, the inevitable question: "Hey, I thought you said there was sex in this book!" Sigh.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-24 01:25 am (UTC)It's one of my very, very favorite contemporary novels; though you'll be pleased to know that a prominent leftist blogger hoisted me with my own petard by privately challenging me to a public debate about it, insisting that it's an apology for colonialism. Someday we'll have that debate. When I received the challenge, I thought: Well, she's probably right but I still love it. In the Skin of a Lion is better.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-24 02:06 am (UTC)Apology for colonialism? Because it presents romantically some belated explorers? Your friend is mad, or immersed in madness. God, the cause is so doomed. I wonder what genius at the CIA decided to stop pouring millions into abstract art and instead fund this inane endless purification ritual. Etc. etc., you've heard all that.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-24 04:32 am (UTC)The English Patient is pretty overtly and vehemently a denunciation of colonialism by the end. The tale-within-the-tale of the doomed desert mappers is complicated by the frame story in terms that seem inspired by just that kind of literary criticism. I suppose one argument against it would be that it upholds bourgeois individualism, which Ondaatje seems happy to do and he does it quite beautifully. I think the person in question was repulsed aesthetically by it as well, and possibly (though this could be libel) worked backward from that to a political position. (I do this myself. It makes the hours go by.) However, in a review of Anil's Ghost, a critic for some liberal-but-always-willing-to-support-a-fascist-war newspaper, either the Washington Post or the NY Times, professed to be relieved that it did not repeat the irresponsible Third World solidarity of The English Patient!
Not incidentally, I am in fact using for my grad school writing sample an essay on TEP.