Justice and the pathos of understanding in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost.

Kertzer, Jon

ONE OF THE MOST HORRIFIC IMAGES IN MICHAEL ONDAATJE'S NOVEL Anil's Ghost, presents a truck driver, Gunesena, crucified to the tarmac on a country road in Sri Lanka (111). The scene summons one of European culture's most revered symbols, but leaves the reader baffled as to its significance in a land where Christianity is superseded by older myths written in an alphabet in which the words "beautiful" and "dangerous" differ only by a single syllable (192). (1) Although it is easy to see that the crucifixion is ironic, it is difficult to trace the convolutions of that irony. As an emblem of redemption through suffering, Christ's ecstatic agony on the cross is itself dangerously beautiful, whereas Gunesena is tortured according to the "mad logic" (186) of a political terror without clear cause, purpose or value. There is no sense to it, yet its very senselessness finds expression in a symbol whose meaning is sanctioned by centuries of devotion. "[E]ven crucifixion isn't a major assault nowadays" (130), remarks Gamini, the doctor who extracts the nails many hours later, as if Christ's fate hardly deserves notice in an undeclared civil war that over the last seventeen years has cost more than 60,000 lives in seventeen years (Globe and Mail, May 23, 2000, A14). (2) What does it mean to use a symbol by casting it adrift from its conventional moorings?

My purpose here is to examine how Ondaatje moors and unmoors meaning in Anil's Ghost in a manner that I will call pathetic. The pathos arises not just from his skill in eliciting sympathy for a tormented nation, but from his evocation of a vexed understanding within a literary ethic that both encourages and baffles the pursuit of justice. He writes one kind of novel in the guise of another, so that what seems to be a familiar murder mystery, in which truth is discoverable and justice prevails, turns into something far more troubling. Similarly, he does not offer a political novel of the sort that maps out a political milieu, debates social ideas, or even bothers to distinguish between the warring factions, apart from mentioning a brutal government fighting guerrillas in the north and insurgents in the south (42). (3) One reviewer was so irritated by the lack of "hard information about Sri Lanka" that she condemned the characters as utterly self-absorbed and the style as "empty claptrap" (Allen 63). While knowledgeable readers can probably supply names and dates, (4) Ondaatje exhibits no such interest, just as the exhausted doctors in his tale do not pause to identify the mutilated bodies that they tend day after day (243). They are only concerned with healing, as in a sense is he, although he never prescribes any social remedy that might heal Sri Lanka's wounds. Instead, as he has remarked in several interviews, he prefers to make a "reconnaissance" of fragmentary experiences and images that gradually gain mythic significance (Bush 242, also Wachtel 256, Smith 69). In the case of Gunesena's pierced palms, however, the myth is obvious but its significance is not. Accordingly, I begin with the near at hand.

Touch

To readers familiar with Ondaatje's writing, Gunesena's misfortune may recall the torture of Caravaggio, whose thumbs are cut off in The English Patient; or the obsession with fingers expressed by the young gunfighter-poet in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; or the "[s]uicide of the hands" suffered by jazz cornetist, Buddy Bolden, in Coming Through Slaughter (49). Although vision is the most common metaphor for understanding ("I see what you mean," "clarity of thought," etc.) (5), Ondaatje often prefers the sense of touch, using hands to express all that is tactile and textured in human perception. Hands evoke our grasp of the heft of being: how we fumble with the cumbersome foreignness of things even as we caress them into human shape through work and art. (6) The sheer physicality of the world is at once within our reach and beyond our grasp; it is an impenetrable body that is also the source of sustenance. To handle things, to be handy, is a both a virtue and a horror for his characters. For example, Billy the Kid reaches into the stomach of a wounded comrade to extract a bullet, in a jig-saw puzzle of a poem that interchanges its lines as if to discover how things fit together: His stomach was warm remembered this when I put my hand into a pot of luke warm tea to wash it out dragging out the stomach to get the bullet he wanted to see when taking tea with Sally Chisum in Paris Texas (Billy 27)

Touching the very quick of the wound permits an unnerving intimacy with his friend that is also a way of feeling death at one's fingertips with a tangible immediacy impossible to abstract understanding. The latter is represented with fanatical precision by Billy's adversary, Pat Garrett, whose Cartesian rationalism--detached, indifferent, self-sufficient--contrasts Billy's fleshy phenomenology. When Pat finally kills Billy, he perversely re-enacts this moment of touching, as his bullet burrows into Billy's brain.

In Anil's Ghost, tactile knowledge again confronts abstract understanding, but instead of two gunfighters, we have the hand of a surgeon opposed to the hand of a torturer. At first glance the novel seems to be a forensic mystery story of the sort that, adapting Northrop Frye's terms, we might call an "epiphany of justice." (7) In this genre, a detective (another Cartesian observer) solves a murder by skilfully interpreting evidence until the guilty party is revealed, usually in a final, dramatic scene. The reader is keen to discover the murderer, but is even more intrigued by the meticulously constructed inferential path that leads the detective through confusion and doubt toward the truth. This is--or should be--the path of justice. What makes the genre so comforting is its ready association of reason, truth, guilt and punishment, each advancing inexorably to the next through a moral and narrative dynamic that drives the story to its satisfying conclusion. Solving the mystery permits an enriched sense of resolution, because simply revealing the truth is sufficient to expose the guilty party and ensure the triumph of justice--the epiphany. The genre is redemptive, not only because it celebrates the efficacy of reason in the service of justice, but because it provides an imaginative victory over death. The ultimate secret of the murder mystery is death itself, but even it can be tamed, at least momentarily, by the clever detective (such as Sherlock Holmes and his many followers) and by the institutions of social order (Scotland Yard, the courts). However, the Sherlock Holmes model suggests complications that Ondaatje will exploit. Even the most trustworthy social institutions require an inspired outsider like Holmes to help them crack the case, but inspiration is a dangerous eruption of energy, even when it is summoned to enforce social norms. It may produce a criminal genius like Professor Moriarty, and even Holmes, with his moodiness, music and drugs, has a darker side. Equally dangerous is the complication, especially strong in American literature, that one might have to step outside the law to find justice, either because the forces of law are corrupt or because of the bureaucratic constraints of legality.

Anil's Ghost summons inspiration in its quest for justice, but by giving freer play to the disruptive powers on which it relies, it transforms Holmes into a makamkruka: "an agitator. Someone who perhaps sees things more truly by turning everything upside down. He's a devil almost, a yaksa" (165). While the conventional detective story devises many twists in its search for hidden truths, it rarely suggests that the truth, once discovered, may be insufficient or unavailing or, worse still, that it may provoke further injustice. Truth is supposed to make you free (John 8:32), but what if it is just another source of suffering? Anil's Ghost begins with a corpse and two intrepid detectives: Anil Tissera, a forensic anthropologist, and Sarath Diyasena, an archaeologist. Anil is partly an outsider or "prodigal" (10), since she left her native Sri Lanka fifteen years earlier to pursue a career in the West. As she investigates atrocities on behalf of the Centre for Human Rights in Geneva, she naively believes that if she can prove government complicity in political murder, then she can demand justice. Although she is examining just one body in a country littered with victims, she trusts that "[t]o give him a name would name the rest" (56). Although her quest is dangerous, she is confident about its essential worth, and reassures Sarath: "Secrets turn powerless in the open air.... You're an archaeologist. Truth comes finally into the light" (259). She assumes that truth is enlightening, but he warns her not to trust her eyes: "I don't think clarity is necessarily truth" (259). As an archaeologist he regards knowledge as more tactile and earthy, but also as ambiguous: "I love history, the intimacy of entering all those landscapes. Like entering a dream. Someone nudges a stone away and there's a story" (259). Stories remain mysterious even when they offer to solve mysteries, and they may lead to unforeseen conclusions. His fears prove justified when, in the novel's calculated anti-climax, the truth proves to be not only useless--"he would have given his life for the truth if the truth were of any use" (157)--but deadly, as it costs him his life. The point is not that they fail in their mission. They succeed, but the secret that they unearth consumes them. (8)

Far from being triumphant, the knowledge that Anil pieces together so ingeniously is pathetic in the special sense that pathos, combined with the novel's fearful brutality, contributes to a tragic vision of modern history. The pathos of understanding arises from Ondaatje's ambiguous treatment of knowledge as a means of grasping the world through the combined faculties of mind and body. On the one hand, he presents a romance of understanding that transforms knowledge into science, and science into art; on the other hand, he presents knowledge as faltering pathetically behind the reality that it grasps only well enough to be its victim.

Handiness

The romance of understanding might also be called the handiness of thought. It requires an intimate familiarity derived from the wisdom and expertise cultivated in sciences like anthropology and archaeology in Anil's Ghost; or cartography, geology and geography in The English Patient; or engineering in In the Skin of a Lion. These disciplines are wonderful because they are at once disciplined and inspired. They elicit all the virtues that Ondaatje treasures: patience, tact, curiosity, encyclopaedic information, daring speculation, rigorous logic infused with a sense of wonder. They require a "sweet touch" (307) as well as a nimble brain. Scientists and scholars master the tools of their trade so well that they develop an instinctive rapport with their materials, like the construction workers dangling precariously in In the Skin of a Lion, or Kip defusing bombs in The English Patient. To touch is to know intimately. Similarly Anil and Sarath decipher dusty clues that can be teased into revealing the great civilisations of Sir Lanka's past. Their mentor, the blind anthropologist Palipana, is the Homer of Anil's Ghost. Part sage and part fraud, he writes "in spite of blindness, in large billowing script that was half language, half pageantry--the border between them blurred" (94). A few scrapes on a bone tell him about the lives of people who lived thousands of years ago. The novel lovingly probes Sri Lanka's ancient history, revealing the richness of its accomplishments, as if nothing human ever dies entirely because the world remains marked with the poetry of its passing, providing we are sensitive enough to read it. History was ever-present around him. The stone remnants of royal bathing pools and water gardens, the buried cities.... Still, the patterns that emerged for Palipana had begun to coalesce. They linked hands. They allowed walking across water, they allowed a leap from treetop to treetop. The water filled a cut alphabet and linked this shore and that. And so the unprovable truth emerged. (80,83)

Mortality--the way things flourish and die--displays itself in signs that express the immortality of human efforts, which endure as pageantry, religion, history and art. History is ever-present because nothing is lost entirely; everything leaves a trace from which the past can be reconstructed. Similarly, Anil's faith is that an intelligible account of the past will disclose patterns of responsibility and accountability through which justice can be affirmed.

Palipana is an epigraphist who loves runes and graffiti etched in stone, and who is honoured after his death by having a "yard-long sentence" of his wisdom (107) chiselled into rock where it is lapped by water. (9) As a poet, Ondaatje exhibits a fascination with words and things, which like water and rock, like flesh and stone, are elementally different yet enhance each other's character: "The water filled a cut alphabet." The fluidity of language delineates the solidity of matter, which in turn, imparts its substance to words. Ondaatje reveals his continuing debt to romanticism when he dares to imagine a poetic fusion of words and things so intense that language overcomes its mediating function and directly bodies forth the world. Instead of intervening between us and the things that it signifies, poetic language would lyrically embody them. Thus Coleridge longed "to destroy the old antithesis of Words & Things, elevating, as it were words into Things, & living Things too"(Letters 626), in which case the poetic word would touch us palpably: "it heats and burns, makes itself to be felt. If we do not grasp it, it seems to grasp us, as with a hand of flesh and blood, and completely counterfeits an immediate presence, an intuitive knowledge" (Inquiring Spirit 101). Such tactile language later becomes an aim of modernist poetry as proclaimed in T. E. Hulme's imagist manifestos: "With perfect style, the solid leather for reading, each sentence should be a lump, a piece of clay, a vision seen; rather, a wall touched with soft fingers" (79); and by William Carlos Williams: "Oh catch up a dozen good smelly names.... But can you not see, can you not taste, can you not smell, can you not hear, can you not touch--words?" (10). It is also the effect of Ondaatje's condensed style, which has, in Karen E. Smythe's words, "a linguistic density that evokes an almost physical response--writing that can tingle the senses" (3). Similarly, Marni Parsons finds in his latest volume of poems, Handwriting, "[a] yearning for a gone sympathy between word and thing, an erotics of linguistic attachment, a longing to defy postmodern distance between signifier and signified" (70).

The defiant romantic and modernist nostalgia detected here is a strong current in Anil's Ghost. Palipana is an Ondaatjean hero: a flawed, romantic scientist so in touch with his work that he can read the language of stone and "leap from treetop to treetop" by making daring inferences. He cultivates an intuitive knowledge that probes mysteries ("the unprovable truth") found not beyond, but within science. Ondaatje invests these mysteries with value by modulating his tone, so that scientific curiosity gives way to aesthetic admiration, and then to quasi-mystical reverence. This modulation occurs again when Sarath recounts how, while excavating a flooded tomb in China (water and rock), he felt strangely exhilarated by the sixty-four bells discovered beside an ancient ruler's coffin. As the bells rang out after centuries of silence, he explains: Music was not entertainment, it was a link with ancestors who had led us here, 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 mystic logic to it.... Each bell had two notes to represent the two sides of the spirit, containing a balance of opposing forces. Possibly it was those bells that made me an archaeologist. (261)

The bells did not inspire him to look beyond science, but to appreciate its unfathomable depths. At this point, the detective quest is redirected inward. Instead of raising a buried secret into the light of day, it sinks into a fertile, vivifying darkness, where truth is associated not with "clarity," as Anil expects, but with "cloud" and "nuance" as Sarath suggests in his response to her (259). Ondaatje evokes this downward quest by quoting (actually, misquoting) a line from D. H. Lawrence's poem, "Bavarian Gentians" (119), in which the poem's speaker ignites a flower to illuminate his path into the underworld: Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark (Lawrence 243)

It is possible to see Anil as a Persephone-figure, divided between worlds (East and West, the living and the dead) and drawn into an underworld that she hopes to illuminate, but in which she is finally engulfed.

Ondaatje's artful detection goes far beyond Sherlock Holmes's scrutiny of tell-tale dust and tobacco. By celebrating a "mystic logic" that fuses science and art, knowledge and music, rock and word, he ventures as close to religious reverence as his novel permits in its optimistic moments. To this end, conventional religious imagery from Christianity (crucifixion) and Buddhism (contemplation) is absorbed into his evocation of an inspired, sympathetic wisdom that refines our minds and hands until we become ideally suited to the world. He envisions a secular grace in which being, knowing and doing (existence, cognition and ethics) are perfectly consonant. Such would be the epiphany of justice offered by Anil's Ghost, if it were allowed to go unchallenged, just as it might be the beatific vision contemplated by the 120-foot-high Buddha, whose stone eyes are restored by the sculptor, Ananda Udugama, in the novel's coda. Those eyes "that had once belonged to a god" (304) might see what Palipana's hands imagine in their touching.

Pathos

To leave this optimistic view unchallenged, however, would be to ignore warnings that continually undercut Anil's faith in rationality. Sarath offers a sceptical counsel, Gamini cautions that "in the heart of any faith is a history that teaches us not to trust" (193), and even in his keenest insights, Palipana glimpses only an "unprovable truth" tendered by "his unprovable theories" (83). Anil trusts in reason, not just in the sense that she is confident in her analytical powers, but that she believes reason will dispel falsehood through the very force of its rationality: truth should be stronger than deceit. She does not realize that Gamini's warning about naive faith applies both to her own research, and self-reflexively to history itself. Since history, too, requires faith in a retrospective intelligence that discerns meaningful patterns in the disarray of human events, even it is not trustworthy. History teaches us not to trust historians. It is typical of Ondaatje's vexed romanticism that at the very moment of revelation, truth should slip just out of reach by drifting into fantasy, as if modern science inevitable reverts to its magical sources in alchemy and astrology. For example, when radio telescopes turn their gigantic ears to heaven and read "the huge history of the sky," they cast a horoscope in which Anil reads her own destiny: "Who was out there? How far away was that signal? Who was dying unmoored?" (255). Truth, even scientific truth, is always tinged by magic; and like inspiration, magic is too unruly to be an reliable ally. Like the sorcerer's apprentice in Goethe's fable, (10) it might release chaos as well as freedom. Although the last question concerns Anil's friend, Leaf Niedecker (named in tribute to the American poet, Lorine Niedecker), who has a fatal disease, it also applies to Anil, as she is cast adrift between truth and falsehood.

If Palipana is the novel's sorcerer who brings the past back to life by deciphering its codes, Anil is the apprentice who invokes uncanny forces (her "ghost") in the cause of justice, but loses control of them. The same fate befalls the novel as a whole. Signification--the power to generate meaning--is unmoored because the "mystic logic" (261) of science and art is confounded by the "mad logic" (186) of political terrorism, which is methodical yet demented. When rebels kidnap Dr Corea and taunt him in an incomprehensible "idiot language" (122), they mimic the lapse into non-sense that threatens Anil's Ghost. Instead of a poetic fusion of words and things, the novel risks utter confusion. How we finally interpret it depends on how we assess these rival claims to determine meaning. Does one logic dominate the other, can they be reconciled, or does their rivalry remain unresolved?

Although their opposition might be regarded as a simple moral contest between art (mystical, life-affirming) and politics (mad, life-denying), this would be to sentimentalise a much more fraught relationship. Certainly, knowledge would be splendidly tactile if we were all devoted scientists like Palipana or artists like Ananda, but usually we are clumsy with both our thoughts and our hands. We are maladroit, Ondaatje shows, because knowledge comes as an afterthought. The pathos of understanding is that it is belated: it falters behind experience, and usually arrives too late to render justice to it. The most famous expression of this dilemma is Hegel's warning in Philosophy of Right that the brilliance of philosophical knowledge is only a "grey" substitute for the vital reality that it comprehends: Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering. (Hegel xxx)

The fusion of words and things appears here as a partnership between the ideal and the real "in its substance," while Hegel's heroic definition of philosophy as "the thought of the world" applies nicely to Palipana's inspired science, as he reads sermons in stone in order to rejuvenate antiquity. Although Anil is not so presumptuous as "to teach the world what it ought to be," she is a disciple of Minerva (wisdom) on a moral mission to prove that "One victim can speak for many victims" (Anil 176). But what good is knowledge if it comes too late?

The cruel irony that Anil's ingenuity might disclose a truth that speaks for no one is suggested by Gunesena's fortuitous rescue, which, in its own small but painful way, illustrates the pathos of belated understanding. At first she and Sarath drive right past, assuming that he is taking a nap beside his truck; only twenty minutes later do they recall that no dogs were barking (a clue borrowed from a Sherlock Holmes story) and infer that something sinister has occurred. In this case, knowledge does not come too late. They return in time to save him, but only through good luck. He is saved, not because he deserves it, or because he teaches a lesson about patience or sacrifice, but simply through an ingenious accident. He could just as easily have perished, and his death by crucifixion would be no more meaningful than his rescue. Applying this lesson more widely, Anil admits that archaeologists makes sense of the past only because natural and human catastrophes (Pompeii, Laetoli, Hiroshima) have accidentally preserved evidence to be inspected centuries later. The fruit of past chaos and a lucky chance is the placid understanding of science, which knows but cannot rejuvenate the colourful reality it recasts in shades of rational grey. The pathos of understanding is that it severs meaning from experience, so that being, thought, and action can never be fully consonant: Tectonic slips and brutal human violence provided random time-capsules of unhistorical lives. A dog in Pompeii. A gardener's shadow in Hiroshima. But in the midst of such events, she realized, there could never be any logic to the human violence without the distance of time. For now it [her investigation of atrocities in Sri Lanka] would be reported, filed in Geneva, but no one could ever give meaning to it. She used to believe that meaning allowed a person a door to escape grief and fear. But she saw that those who were slammed and stained by violence lost the power of language and logic. (55)

The disjunction between experience and understanding reduces "meaning" to a ghost of the violent reality that is supersedes, and displaces justice into the attenuated form of a document in a file in Geneva, which may some day be unearthed by another detective.

For most of the story, Anil is shielded from the horrors that she investigates by a "door"--intellectual and emotional detachment--that makes "meaning" possible but justice unattainable. The understanding supplied by forensic anthropology arises when she discerns "[p]atterns of death" (279) in the tangle of evidence that she has amassed. Then random clues fall into shape in her hands. But they can only be recognized as "clues" in so far as they are presumed to contribute to a systematic explanation of events, and such presumptuous systems are tenuous hypotheses at best, which may only satisfy our secret desires (as when Ananda reconstructs the face of his dead wife instead of the murder victim) and which lapse back into "grief and fear" as soon as they lose their explanatory power. The dislocated narrative of Anil's Ghost, with its abrupt flashbacks to unrecorded horrors, re-enacts this threat. As the detective structure advances steadily toward a promised resolution that never comes, it is interrupted by digressions revealing that death without pattern--without justification or value--is the real trauma of political brutality. Gunesena's crucifixion is a pathetic example of a recognizable pattern that disintegrates as soon as we try to interpret it, and if he represents his troubled country, then its suffering, too, defies the power of language and logic. There is no logic to death as random as the public bombs that devastate crowded markets (127), or as horrifying as the flood of mutilated corpses washed down rivers and in from the sea (212-3). In its darkest moments, the novel suggests that "[t] t he reason for war was war" (43), which is to say, war feeds on itself without reason or justice.

Justice

If "the power of language and logic" is nullified by a pathological violence that is its own raison d'etre, does that leave Anil's Ghost drifting both conceptually and morally, as Brooke Allen complains in a caustic review? (11) What justice does it foresee?

Ondaatje's many commentators agree that he cultivates poetic crises; they disagree on how he resolves them, or if he even wants to. As he remarked in conversation: "Writing is trying to make order, to understand something about yourself. Orderless situations are, for me, the most interesting things, and I tend to write about the finding out of order" (Kareda 49). Even this casual remark illustrates the crisis. To give an orderly account of orderlessness repeats the pathos of understanding by rendering systematic the chaos that invigorates us precisely because it defies all attempts to harness it. Like a "science" of the unconscious or a "theory" of the irrational, such an account is self-defeating unless it somehow accommodates a transgressive impulse that threatens order (conceptual, social, aesthetic) until it collapses. Ondaatje both imposes and renounces order, although not in equal measure. He either focuses on glorious moments when disorder suddenly assumes a graceful shape, for example, when Buddy Bolden channels the fierce energies of racist America into jazz. Or conversely, he focuses on terrifying moments when familiar patterns disintegrate, for example, "the one altered move that will make them [the stars] manic" in Billy the Kid (41), and the "false act of madness" that disrupts "the centre of the symmetrical plot" in In the Skin of a Lion (191). These crises, when anarchy and precision pass into each other, are both moments of truth, but of opposite truths, neither of which takes priority. One does not command the other. Palipana weaves falsehood into truth when he fraudulently makes his great archaeological discovery, which may be history, or fiction, or both. The novel's narrative voice concludes hopefully: "perhaps for him it was not a false step but the step to another reality, the last stage of a long, truthful dance" (81). Truth emerges from a graceful ceremony, not just from factual accuracy. However, the wavering phrase, "perhaps for him," functions like the ambiguous "Asian nod" that puzzles Anil, because it "included in its almost circular movement the possibility of a no" (16-7). It might signify affirmation, denial, or hesitancy between the two. It might hint that all our steps, even the best intentioned, tumble into error.

Similarly, Ondaatje told another interviewer: "All art, for that matter, is self-conscious.... [O]ne has to be on the border where that craft meets the accidental and the unconscious, as close as possible to the unconscious" (Solecki 22). He presents himself as a craftsman who ventures to the verge of the accidental but does not fall in, just as Sherlock Holmes draws on unruly inspiration that he rules through his intellect. However, there is no necessary reason why this fertile disorder need submit to artistic direction, especially since its secret energy--its fertility--is uncontrollable. Like the sorcerer's apprentice, he might be overwhelmed by the forces that he releases. The same danger threatens the reader of Anil's Ghost, which ends with another Asian nod. M. S. Nagarajan takes comfort in the novel's placid coda, where Ananda restores the Buddha and aspires to share its vision: "The superb ending is on a positive note of affirmation that even with the escalating number of politically motivated murders and arson, there is the coming together of people in breathing fresh life, in recreation ... there is the life-affirming and life-sustaining spirit that conquers and survives, towering over and above death and destruction" (Nagarajan). While it is comforting to assume that formal order--intelligibility, humane values, justice--will ultimately master the confusion that provides its content, there is no sure reason why it need do so. If we feel that it should do so, in other words, that literature should be socially productive and morally uplifting, then we share Anil's quest for justice.

This is a noble aim that the novel encourages but gradually frustrates: it promises to solve a mystery, only to recede into a deeper mystery. How can we secure any moral footing in a disjunctive narrative that separates knowledge from experience, and justice from knowledge? Simply insisting on the necessity for a redemptive vision is to repeat Ananda's act of fashioning the remnants of horror into the face of a loved one. Justice requires, not just knowledge, but the recuperative power granted by an adequating or healing agency in thought. Like history, justice is a discourse that retrospectively discerns an intelligible course in events, but it is far more presumptuous. It assumes further that, ideally, events can be assessed morally as virtuous or vicious; that the culpability or innocence of ethical actors can be weighed; that fair judgments can be rendered by legitimate authorities; and that punishment or rewards commensurate with the original deeds can serve as reparation for them. History seeks to understand the past, but justice seeks to amend it, and even to "touch" it in the sense of rectifying its errors by offering symbolic compensation for what happened. Justice connects past to future, not just historically, but through a judicial semiotic that matches action to retribution, and redresses the social balance by setting things right. Only then can the violence of the law (arrest, imprisonment, execution) be a just corrective to the violence (criminality) whose injuries it claims to heal. (12) Therefore, justice operates through a potent combination of logic, imagination and faith. Through an intricate network of symbolic linkages it secures belief in the logical and moral coherence of human conduct, and in the efficacy of judgment acting in concert with the intelligibility of the world. All must cooperate through what Wai Chee Dimock calls an "adequating rationality" that "image[s] forth the world as a commensurate order, so that problem and solution [are] not only reflexively generated but also instrumentally corresponding" (166). World and mind (rock and word) must be reciprocally attuned (95), as if they share the same syntax (110). For all its logical rigour, justice is a "dream of objective adequation, ... [a] dream of a world exactly equal to the verdict it sees fit to pronounce" (197). In this way it provides an imaginative triumph over error, loss, and even death, which (as in the classic detective story) is no longer final but an integral part of the system.

If at a few exalted moments, Ondaatje makes this baroque judicial semiotic seem within reach, at other times he shows how presumptuous it is, and how pathetic to believe that a neglected document in a drawer in Geneva might be an effective vehicle of justice. Too little, too late. The closer Anil's investigation gets to the truth, the less she trusts the power of truth to rectify the violence engulfing her, because unforgivable violence seems to be man's natural element. For instance: They had brought him [Gamini] nine-month-old twins, each shot in the palms and one bullet each in their right legs--so it was no accident, a close-range job and intentional, left to die; the mother had been killed.... You thought, What did they do to deserve this, and then, What did they do to survive this? It was the formal act of evil perhaps, he didn't know. Thirty people had been massacred that morning. (242)

There is no reason for such brutality, and even if it somehow is explicable, there is no adequate response to it. We are left with T. S. Eliot's bewildered question from "Gerontion": "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" (Eliot 40).

Critics have accused Ondaatje of being recklessly fond of violence, especially in his earlier work, which romanticizes anti-social men who find a fierce refuge in what Lorraine M. York nicely calls "'the male chaotic'--a realm of seemingly random, centrifugal violent energy, associated with males and either opposed or ignored by females" (77). His later work has also been criticised for irresponsibility--for exoticizing the East in defiance of political realities (Mukherjee 33-4); or for preferring frisky postmodern aesthetics to social commitment (Beddoes 206); or for substituting moodiness for insight (Allen 63). In reply, critics like Ajay Heble, Christian Bok, and Susan Ellis argue that his earlier writing emphasizes the subversion of order through physical, sexual, and verbal energies, but his later writing uses a more "ex-centric" style to direct violence to productive social ends. Similarly, Marni Parsons finds "a heightened political awareness" that offers "a gesture of resistance" (73) to the poems in Handwriting. I, too, am looking for a final gesture that might illuminate Eliot's question by re-examining the disjunction between knowledge, justice, and responsibility.

Responsibility

As I have noted, Anil's Ghost is not a political novel in the traditional sense: it offers little political analysis and foresees no political solutions. Nevertheless, it conveys a powerful compassion by directing attention away from brutal men, who now remain unseen, and towards their victims and the people who tend them. When doctors and nurses operate on maimed patients day after day, all on the same table, they ignore the political or ethnic affiliations of the victims (243), because the only meaning of pain is pain, (13) and their only responsibility is to alleviate it. This is one of the novel's defining ethical moments. Different readers might judge that compassion transcends politics, or that compassion should inform politics, or that compassion is always already political, but in any case Ondaatje depicts a primary ethical encounter between the handy and the needy: between knowledgeable though fallible doctors and suffering victims. The encounter renders each patient at once unique and anonymous. Each one has specific wounds to be tended appropriately, yet each person is identified only by those wounds and the urgent need to treat them. A comparable moment appears in The English Patient when Hana nurses soldiers fighting with the Canadian Infantry Division in Italy, and calls them all "Buddy." She knows their wounded bodies intimately, yet she is afraid of knowing them too well: She feared the day she would remove blood from a patient's face and discover her father or someone who had served her food across a counter on Danforth Avenue. She grew harsh with herself and the patients. Reason was the only thing that might save them, and there was no reason. The thermometer of blood moved up the country. (English Patient (50)

The last two sentences apply equally well to Sri Lanka, where Gamini is shocked to find himself in exactly the situation that terrifies Hana, when he abruptly faces the corpse of his brother, Sarath, its flesh tortured, its hands broken. In the novel's most pathetic moment, Gamini, his medical expertise now useless, dresses the wounds of his dead brother, with whom he shared an intense, fractious love that can now never be resolved. Ondaatje calls the scene a "pieta between brothers" (288), and it echoes earlier images of a mother grieving over her child (119, 156), one of which appeared in an ancient rock carving that haunted Sarath: "the mother's back bowed in affection or grief. An unseen child. All the gestures of motherhood harnessed. A muffled scream in her posture" (157).

The pieta image, which brings another Christian icon to Sri Lanka, is the companion piece to Gunesena's crucifixion, but again its meaning is unmoored. It is fraternal as well as maternal, and it evokes, not the universality of grief reaching across cultures, but grief's unanswerable particularity. Anil had argued that one murder victim, if accurately identified, could stand for all victims (176), and with respect to her quest for justice, she is right. Justice is never concerned solely with individuals, because it is social in scope and general in formulation. Individual suffering may be terrible, but it is "unjust" only in so far as it falls within a system of judicial prohibitions, a system that provides a response to death. Anil wants her solitary investigation to deploy this larger system; her motto could be, "the personal is political." By contrast, Gamini grieves for a single person, whose death agony was his and his alone, and whose murder cannot stand for, or respond to, the death of anyone else. Gamini finds no solace in an "adequating rationality" because nothing is adequate: the death of one's child or brother or beloved reveals the utter uniqueness of human lives, which are incommensurable. Nothing is "equal" to Sarath. There can be no just response to his death, because no reparation, redress, restitution or retribution is equivalent to him--each word indicating in its prefix the pathetic impossibility of restoring what has been annihilated, or compensating for its loss. (14) Because all human lives are singular and irreplaceable, the truth about how they died is useless. From this intensely personal perspective, the truth that Anil seeks so assiduously is irrelevant, because no knowledge can answer to the absoluteness of death. Gamini's motto might echo Dylan Thomas: "After the first death, there is no other" (Thomas 192). These words do not demean the tens of thousands slaughtered in the civil war, but lament that each one was unique.

Emmanuel Levinas, whose writing prompts the preceding observations, speaks of "the supreme dignity of the unique" (Ethics 101), and uses the metaphor of the "face" to express a primary ethical encounter that is the defining moment of human subjectivity through its assumption of responsibility in relation to an Other. Responsibility is the very structure of subjectivity (95). It is not duty, which must be deliberately undertaken or imposed by a social code, but an unformulated obligation that precedes everything else, even being. Before all being, knowing, or doing, before all political and cultural life, and therefore before any articulation of justice, is the naked presence of the Other in the "rectitude" of its face, which inspires responsibility in me (86). The shocking intimacy of this confrontation is possible only between two, unique people; it is not a social meeting or even a personal one, since it precedes any acquiring of personality. (15) The Other makes no demands of me, yet "summons" me to unlimited responsibility, which I cannot decline, because the moment also precedes all willing (Basic 113). Justice cannot make unlimited demands because it is a discourse of equity, which requires that responsibility be calculated exactly so that a commensurate response (punishment, reward, compensation) can also be calculated. By contrast, the pure ethical encounter is incalculable and, strictly speaking, unknowable. Knowledge depends on recognizing correspondence, analogy or recurrence (67), whereas the "nameless singularity" (85) that Levinas evokes but cannot define, precedes all such correlation. It is not like, equal to, or a repetition of, anything else. The Other remains anonymous, because its alterity can never be known or even "seen." For Levinas, too, knowledge is inevitably belated, while "seeing" implies observing the Other in a pre-established field of vision. The Other cannot be seen in its uniqueness but only touched, or in Levinas's vocabulary, "caressed" like a mystery: "It is this seeking of the caress which constitutes its essence, through the fact that the caress does not know what it seeks" (Ethics 69). Knowing, seeing and speaking arise only afterward as the result of "a search for adequation" (87) within a contextual field--a search equivalent to Anil's quest for justice--whereas the face is pure "signification" prior to any context or content: "the face is meaning all by itself" (86). It is "the signifyingness of meaning" (Basic 102) as a power of articulation, itself unarticulated, that generates all subsequent meanings. What makes the good, good? What makes justice, just? We cannot say, since saying comes later, but we have initially been constituted by an enigmatic relationship that makes goodness and justice possible.

Levinas offers a remarkable recasting of the pathos of understanding, which I venture to apply to Anil's Ghost. In opposition to the belatedness of knowledge, history and justice, he sets a "preoriginal past" (Basic 116) from which issues an "intuition of sociality ... irreducible to comprehension" (7), which makes us strangely vulnerable yet strong. We are responsible before we know what we are responsible for. Knowledge is secondary but, as J.-F. Lyotard explains, this is now a source of ethical strength: when Levinas, citing a much-commented-upon passage of the Talmud, says: "Do before you understand, and the Jews did, and then they understood," he sets the problem exactly right. It is clear that it is not a question of first understanding, no! First, one acts from the obligation that comes from the simple fact that I am being spoken to, that you are speaking to me, and hen, and only then, can one try to understand what has been received. In other words, the obligation operator comes first and then one sees what one is obligated to. (Lyotard 41-2)

If in one sense we are always too late, in another sense we are always early, because we have been positioned by an "intrigue from beyond being" (Basic 101), which gives us moral authority. When we touch the face of the Other, when it intrigues us, then it inspires the "first word," Thou shalt not kill: "the face is what forbids us to kill" (Ethics 89, 86). (16)

In seeking moral ballast for my reading of Anil's Ghost, therefore, I do not appeal to its beatific coda, which may reaffirm the dominance of order over chaos, but need not be interpreted so hopefully, since its final position in the narrative ensures, not that it triumphs by coming last, but that it comes too late. Instead I appeal to Gunesena's crucifixion and the pieta emblem, which do not gesture upward to a divine transcendence of which the novel offers no assurance, but instead reach backward to what Levinas treats as an archaic reverence arising from the inter-meshing of individual lives through a uniqueness that forever joins them even as it separates them. In response to brutal tautologies--the reason for war is war, the meaning of pain is pain--he offers an answering enigma: the meaning of life is life.

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(1) Ondaatje's does not specify which syllable, but his admiration for the Sinhalese alphabet appears more lyrically in some of the poems in Handwriting, and in Running in the Family: "I still believe the most beautiful alphabet was created by the Sinhalese. The insect of ink curves into a shape that is almost sickle, spoon, eyelid. The letters are washed blunt glass which betray no jaggedness ... and so a curling alphabet was derived from its Indian cousin. Moon coconut. The bones of a lover's spine" (Running 83). These final words are grimly ironic in view of the more sinister role of bones in Anil's Ghost.

(2) M. S. Nagarajan observes in a review of Anil's Ghost: "since 1963, it is reported the 70,000 precious lives have been lost in the large-scale campaigns of manslaughter caused by the civil war that has been plaguing the country, and from which, alas, there seems no escape."

(3) For a cogent account of the traditional political novel, see Howe.

(4) For example, Kirthie Abeyesekera: "While he cleverly conceals the identity of his characters in this work of fiction, there's no mistaking 'President Katugala' killed in a bomb blast."

(5) For a study of visual and visionary imagery in Ondaajte, see Kyser.

(6) Stephen Scobie notes Ondaatje's use of damaged hands in "The Reading Lesson: Michael Ondaatje and the Patients of Desire," 102.

(7) In The Secular Scripture Frye calls the detective story, as a form of romance, "an epiphany of law, a balancing and neutralizing activity in society, the murderer discovered at the end balancing the corpse that we normally find at the beginning" (137). He notes, however, that "law is not justice" (138), so the victory of law is a social rather than a moral triumph, though it may be both. Earlier, in Anatomy of Criticism, Frye used the phrase "an epiphany of law" somewhat differently to describe tragedy as a myth commanded by "that which is and must be" (Anatomy 208). I am concerned with the tragic dimension of Anil's Ghost, but not with fate in the classical sense. For an account of Ondaatje's use of the detective format, see Manina Jones's essay, "'So Many Varieties of Murders': Detection and Biography in Coming Through Slaughter."

(8) Readers are never told what happens to Anil, and silence can be ominous in a country where people simply disappear; but near the end we learn that "a long time later" (285) she realized how intense was the bond between Sarath and Gamini. Evidently she survives.

(9) In Handwriting, Ondaatje frequently associates Sri Lanka with the liminal interaction of water and rock, for instance in "Buried": What is eternal is brick, stone, a black lake where water disappears below mud and rises again, the arc of the dagoba that echoes a mountain. (10)

(10) In Goethe's poem, "Der Zauberlehrling," a magician's apprentice is unable to control spirits that he raises with a spell from his master's book: "Die ich rief, die Geister / Werd ich nun nicht los" (Spirits that I summoned / I can't get rid of them," Goethe 175). The poem inspired Paul Dukas's musical tone poem and a sequence in Walt Disney's animated film, Fantasia.

(11) Allen is the novel's harshest critic: "There is so much of this empty claptrap in Anil's Ghost that it stifles the novel's merits, which are not inconsiderable.... All these characters wander about in a sort of solipsistic fog, bumping against one another occasionally but all sunk too deep into their own psyches to connect on more than a primitive, nonverbal level."

(12) The problem of violence in relation to the law and justice is a vexed one that I cannot pursue here. However, I acknowledge the importance of studies such as Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence," and Jacques Derrida's "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority.'"

(13) Elaine Scarry argues in The Body in Pain that pain is unique in having no object in the external world: "desire is desire of x, fear is fear of y, hunger is hunger for z; but pain is not 'of' or 'for' anything--it is itself alone. This objectlessness, the complete absence of referential content, almost prevents it from being rendered in language" (162).

(14) Legal judgments often admit the law's inability to represent the singularity of a person's life or body, and offer a ritual confession of powerlessness. For example, in a suit brought by Richard and Mary Ann Rodriguez against Bethlehem Steel for an accidental injury that ruined his health and their marriage, the judicial ruling concedes that no compensation is really fair: "Money ... cannot truly compensate a wife for the destruction of her marriage, but it is the only known means to compensate for the loss suffered and to symbolize society's recognition that a culpable wrong--even if unintentional--has been done" (quoted in Hyde 103).

(15) As Zygmunt Bauman explains, as soon as a "Third" joins the meeting of Self and Other, morality ends and society begins:

The Third is also an Other, but not the Other we encountered at the "primal scene" where the moral play, not knowing of itself as a play, was staged and directed by my responsibility. The otherness of the Third is of an entirely different order. The two "others" reside in different worlds--two planets each with its own orbit which does not cross with the orbit of the other "other"--and none would survive the swapping of orbits. The two "others" do not converse with each other; if one speaks, the other one does not listen; if the other one does listen, he will not understand what he hears. Each can feel at home only if the other one steps aside, or better still stays outside. The other who is the Third can be encountered only when we leave the realm of morality proper, and enter another world, the realm of Social Order ruled by justice--not morality. (Bauman 113)

(16) Leonard Grob glosses Levinas's primary ethical injunction as follows: The Other who meets me face-to-face challenges my very right to exercise power. In so doing, ethics is born.... The Other who contests me is an Other truly independent of my appropriative powers and thus one to whom I can have, for the first time, ethical obligations. As Levinas puts it, this Other is the first being whom I can wish to murder.... Although the Other appears to me now, on principle, as someone I could wish to kill, he or she in fact summons me to respond with nonviolence: I am called to willingly renounce my power to act immorally. What I hear from the Other, Levinas claims, are the words "Thou shalt not kill." Harkening to this injunction constitutes my inaugural act as an ethical being. (Grob 8-9)

Jon Kertzer

University of Calgary

Jon Kertzer is a Professor in the Department of English, University of Calgary. He specializes in modern British and Canadian literatures, poetics, literary history and literary ethics. Recent publications include Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National History in English-Canadian Literature (U Toronto P) and "W. S. Gilbert and the Fantasy of Justice" in Mosaic (June 2003).