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Abstract
This essay relates Ondaatje’s novel to the philosophical fictions of Foucault and others in order to signal the contribution that literary texts can make to a “political and ethical enterprise that carries anti‐racist dissidence into a deeper confrontation with the history, philosophy, and jurisprudence of ‘transmodernity’” (Gilroy 53). Situating the Sri Lankan civil war within broader geopolitical and legal struggles, Ondaatje’s anti‐war novel diagrams the coming‐to‐dominance of new power–knowledge networks across national and ideological divides – biopolitics (defined by Foucault as the fostering of life in each individual and the population as a whole) as it is overtaken by necropolitics (described by Mbembe as the exercise of power through the wholesale threat and dispensation of death). Anil’s Ghost also elaborates alternate forms of power–knowledge relations with the reader. Thus the novel’s object (emergent transmodernity) and method (experimental dislocation of characters’ and readers’ experiences) can contribute significantly to the rerouting of postcolonial studies towards what Negri terms the “non‐place of Empire” (34). Part I analyses how, through a series of dialogical encounters, Anil’s Ghost displaces fundamental axioms that regulate the politics of truth and the politics of international systems of governance. Part II examines the novel’s method: the aesthetic strategies that both perform the displacements and enlist the reader in this ethical project.
Notes
1. See Goldman’s summary of the debates; see also Cook and Härting.
2. Farrier concurs that “us” is complex, emphasizing the unresolved qualities of Anil’s homecoming.
3. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights was ratified in 1948 (48 votes in favour, 0 against, and 8 abstentions – the Soviet bloc; South Africa; Saudi Arabia). Although legally non‐binding, it is the foundation of the United Nations’ International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights, and Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights – both adopted by the General Assembly in December 1966 and in effect as of 1976.
4. Hindnes and Mbembe summarize Carl Schmitt’s argument and extend it to postcolonial developments.
5. See Burrows for a discussion of the amygdala in relation to trauma.
6. Anil’s breakthrough in interpreting the meaning of Sailor’s bones comes when she expands her approach to include Palipana’s work habits: crouching next to Ananda she palpates his leg muscles to feel the physiological imprint of his work as a miner turned carver (Anil’s Ghost 179).
7. Tambiah summarizes this use of “monkish chronicles”: “By a process of inversion, collective ethnic interests and concerns are projected onto a Buddhist cultural capital which in turn is then seen as requiring and justifying certain forms of political action to ensure its preservation” (59–60). Goldman traces the connections between Palipana and the “eminent Sri Lankan epigraphist Senerat Paranavitana”, who famously claimed Aryan descent for the Sinhalese people.
8. See Barthes, “Myth Today” in Mythologies; Ermarth, “The Narrator as Nobody” in Realism.
9. See Leps (274–75) for further discussion of Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogical “consummation of form” by writer and reader.
10. Scanlan concurs that Ondaatje “risk[s] aestheticizing terror”, but instead creates “a narrative structure that replicates the experience of terror” (302).
11. Ravina commits suicide by ingesting lye; when she is rushed to the hospital, Gamini prolongs her agony because he can’t let her go (Anil’s Ghost 251–53). In a text haunted by death, none is ever described as it actually occurs – yet it is everywhere, in constant fearful anticipation and in infinite excruciating aftershocks.
12. This discussion of heterotopia is part of a larger work, Heterotopias: Dislocating Texts by Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje, forthcoming. See also Hetherington’s use of heterotopia in relation to social ordering, and Burrows’ in relation to trauma in Anil’s Ghost.
13. Agamben defines “inoperativeness” or désoeuvrement as “a generic mode of potentiality that is not exhausted [ … ] in a transitus de potentia ad actum” (transit from potential to action) (62).
14. Robert Latham adapts William James’s term (Pragmatism, 1907) to Canadian social policy; he argues that “multiversalism does not try to fix meaning but to provide a conceptual frame for individuals and groups to navigate democratic contestations and life choices. A multiverse is never complete and is never knowable or transparent” (23).