Travel Writing and the Transnational Author

S. Knowles

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137332455
• eBook ISBN: 9781137332462
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Travel Writing and the Transnational Author explores the travel writing and transnational literature of four authors from the 'postcolonial canon': Michael Ondaatje, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, and Salman Rushdie.

Part I

Travelling Out

1

Michael Ondaatje: The ‘Prodigal–Foreigner’, Reconstruction, and Transnational Boundaries

I Transnational Narration

Unfortunately enough, despite the publication of his recent book, Running in the Family, a book supposedly devoted to his search for roots, Ondaatje’s work gives few indications of his Sri Lankan background. Ondaatje, coming from a Third World country with a colonial past, does not write about his otherness. Nor does he write about the otherness of the Canadian society for him. (Mukherjee, 1985, 51)

Sarath and Gamini [in Anil’s Ghost] criticize Western journalists for swooping into Sri Lanka, tossing off some reductive political analysis and leaving. I don’t see the difference between that and Ondaatje revisiting his native land, observing victims, avoiding political analysis and then retreating to Canada. (LeClair, 2000, n.p.)

With these scathing words, Arun Mukherjee and Tom LeClair nail their critical colours to the mast: Running in the Family, Michael Ondaatje’s quasi-autobiographical travel narrative about the history of the Ondaatjes in Sri Lanka, and Anil’s Ghost, his novel set during the island’s war-ravaged recent past, are both political and ethical disappointments. For these critics, Ondaatje is a Canadian Sri Lankan author, whose engagement with ‘his native land’ is that of a holidaying foreign visitor who refuses to get too involved, ‘observing victims, [but] avoiding political analysis’. Although he ‘com[es] from a Third World country with a colonial past’, they believe he fails to engage with this history, and Canada is the country to which he ‘retreats’: LeClair’s use of a military metaphor indicates a certain combativeness, suggesting Ondaatje must withdraw to Canada after an attack from Sri Lanka. Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, left at age 11, was educated in England, and is now a Canadian citizen – in their opinion, Ondaatje’s writing about Sri Lanka says more about his adopted ‘Western’ position than the ‘Third World […] colonial past’ of his Sri Lankan identity. Also, they believe this Sri Lankan history is inadequately presented; if we accept Benedict Anderson’s assertion that history is ‘the necessary basis of the national narrative’ (Anderson, 1986, 659), then Ondaatje has relinquished his place in the Sri Lankan national narrative. The lack of national alignment seen by these critics is a failure to engage with the history of Sri Lanka: for Mukherjee and LeClair, Ondaatje is a sell-out.

I believe these criticisms of Ondaatje’s Sri Lankan work are misplaced. I say misplaced rather than false, as they are certainly valid in terms of ethno-political accountability: to some extent, Ondaatje fails to deal with the conflicted politics of Sri Lanka. His prose sometimes verges on poetic escapism, and a tendency to pepper his work with fragments of popular song and classical quotations appears at times to be a reluctance to engage with political reality. In Anil’s Ghost, a fragmented structure can lend a detached air to passages about the civil war: a government official is murdered on a train, with no introductory or succeeding commentary (2000, 31–32); there is a stark, unremarked-upon list of victims of political ‘disappearances’ (2000, 41); and the wife of Anil’s colleague walks into the novel, only to be removed by unknown hands after three foreboding pages, and little comment is passed (2000, 172–75). Jon Kertzer asserts that Anil’s Ghost ‘is not a political novel in the traditional sense: it offers little political analysis and foresees no political solutions’ (2003, 131), chiming with the analyses of Mukherjee and LeClair; for these critics, Ondaatje’s elliptical approach indicates an abnegation of responsibility towards the realities involved.

The flaw in such an analysis lies in the assumption that Ondaatje must indeed be in harmony with Anderson’s ‘national narrative’: what the negative reviews of Ondaatje’s work lack is a sense of his positioning beyond questions of national affiliation. This failure to move beyond a restrictive sense of nationality chimes with criticism of Ondaatje in general, which falls into one of two categories: ‘Ondaatje as Canadian author [of Sri Lankan origin]’, or ‘Ondaatje as Sri Lankan author [now Canadian citizen]’. There has been much critical study of Ondaatje as an important Canadian author, winner of the renowned Canadian Council for the Arts Governor General’s Literary Award a record-equalling five times (Canada Council for the Arts, 2012), and a staple subject of established Canadian literary journals. On the other hand, Mukherjee’s description of Ondaatje’s position within ‘the Canadian literary scene’ as a ‘South Asian poet’ (1985, 49) has opened up a space for analyses of Ondaatje and the Sri Lankan ‘homespace’ to which he ‘belong[s]’ (Leon, 2003): he is a Sri Lankan writer who ‘return[s…] to his original Ceylonese homeland’ (Albertazzi, 1993, 62). Certainly, critics on both sides of the divide acknowledge various national influences on Ondaatje, but they do so while underlining a unidirectional movement: he is either a ‘Sri Lankan–Canadian’, who draws on his Sri Lankan past in addressing his Canadian present, or he is a ‘Canadian–Sri Lankan’, applying a knowledge of his Canadian present in writing about his Sri Lankan past. Thus we have Suwanda Sugunasiri’s 1992 article on ‘Sri Lankan Canadian Poets: The Bourgeoisie that Fled the Revolution’, which indicates that Ondaatje’s definition as ‘Sri Lankan Canadian’ involves a break from the past, a flight from the revolutionary atmosphere of Sri Lanka; or Graciela Martínez-Zalce’s piece, which describes as ‘Canadian literature’ the work of the ‘Canadian Sri Lankan author Michael Ondaatje’ (2001, 66). In either case, a single national identity is uppermost, whether it be ‘Sri Lankan’ or ‘Canadian’, and the second nationality merely serves to qualify an already-accepted understanding of Ondaatje’s work.

What interests me, however, is the extent to which Ondaatje’s literature refutes all such analyses: the form and content of his work challenge the idea of ‘national belonging’. This aspect of his work resonates with James Clifford’s assertion that identity is defined by movement rather than belonging: nationality as such is usurped by the concept of ‘dwelling-in-travel’ (1997). Mukherjee is one who sticks to her nationality-centric guns over this, as Ondaatje’s perceived detachment from national affiliation is seen as wholly reprehensible:

Ondaatje, instead of writing about the reality of Canadian life or his Sri Lankan past, chooses to write about the ‘tension between mind and chaos’. […] The metaphysical scarecrow of ‘chaos’ has cut [Ondaatje] off from his fellow men in the ordinary walks of life […] he is indulging in a self-willed isolation as well as Romantic posturing. (1985, 54–55)

I reject Mukherjee’s limited critique: I believe that Ondaatje’s work, based on ideas of the importance of travel to a sense of self, complicates easy binaries such as ‘Canada–Sri Lanka’ or ‘home–away’, and in doing so presents itself as transnational literature. This is enacted not only through the dependence of this writing on ideas of travel and movement, but also in the forms the narrative takes: fragmentations, slippages, ellipses, and silences are not indicative of a lack of ethical responsibility, as suggested above, but intimate a reaction against the linearity of national affiliations and a declaration of the transnationalism of Ondaatje’s work.

In this chapter, the first in the ‘Travelling Out’ section on authors whose travelogues occupy a position from relatively early in their novel-writing careers, I use analyses of Running in the Family and Anil’s Ghost to offer an alternative to reductive, ethnocentric criticisms of Ondaatje’s work, building on the ideas of transnationalism as wide-ranging, multivalent, and ‘new’ that I advanced in my Introduction. In later chapters, I will look at the extent to which a focus on personal and/or geopolitical transnationalisms allows a distinction between the travel writing and transnational literature of these authors, separating out their respective influences. In Ondaatje’s case, however, my focus on the textual aspects of transnationalism entails a more contained, even claustrophobic view of his work: I analyse the transnational textuality of Running in the Family to a much greater degree than in my later studies of From Heaven Lake, In an Antique Land, or The Jaguar Smile. Ondaatje’s literature, to a greater extent than that of Seth, Ghosh, or Rushdie, is an exercise in transnational writing, in his travelogue as much as in later work.

As a result, I analyse two features of transnational form that emerge in Ondaatje’s work, and that contribute to his transnationalism in different – yet related – ways. On the one hand, I put forward the paradoxical, multivalent idea of the ‘prodigal–foreigner’, which Ondaatje introduces as a driving principle for his writing through the character of himself as a returnee to Sri Lanka in Running in the Family, and revisits through the Sri Lankan–British–North American protagonist of Anil’s Ghost. The paradoxical idea is suggested by Ondaatje in the earlier text, and an exchange early in Anil’s Ghost between the title character and a Sri Lankan she meets calls to mind the same troublesome opposition:

I sit in a house on Buller’s Road [in Colombo]. I am the foreigner.

I am the prodigal who hates the foreigner. (1984 [1982], 79)

‘After fifteen years. The return of the prodigal.’

‘I’m not a prodigal.’ (2000, 10)

If Anil is not a ‘prodigal’, the novel seems to ask, what is she? Numerous links between Anil and Sri Lanka are displayed throughout, so neither is she solely a ‘foreigner’; my idea of the ‘prodigal–foreigner’ addresses her paradoxical attitude towards the island, an ambivalence that is also clear in the figure of Ondaatje himself. The ‘prodigal–foreigner’ embodies an ambivalent, doubling sense subverting strictly ‘national’ delineations, underlining the transnationality of Ondaatje’s work, and emphasising the importance of travel to his writing.

The other concept is that of reconstruction, which also involves a problematic combination of the two poles of ‘home’ and ‘away’. This concept is more complicated than that of the prodigal–foreigner, as Ondaatje’s use combines an aesthetic interpretation of the term with a political one: ‘reconstruction’ is both a representative artistic device – in Anil’s Ghost, the reconstruction of Sri Lanka’s ‘dissolved’ artworks is a theme that runs alongside the putting-together of the text itself; in Running in the Family, others’ memories of Ondaatje family history are framed together within a personal narrative – and a description of a physical process, enacted in the wake of literal devastation. While reconstruction is an important positive formal characteristic of Ondaatje’s work, then, it also presents an amalgamation of art with suffering; it is this conflation that leaves Ondaatje open to criticisms of apoliticalism such as LeClair’s reference to his ‘observing [and] avoiding political analysis’. In contrast, I believe that the focus on reconstruction as a formal artistic conceit affirms the author’s commitment to restorative political processes: rather than stopping short of political engagement due to an excessive artistic focus, he arrives at a conception of politics through aesthetics.

The formal structures of reconstruction and the prodigal–foreigner are central to my project to resituate Ondaatje as a transnational author, for whom the fictive memoir-like travel work Running in the Family is the foundation of his presentation of Sri Lanka – and, thus, the basis for the millennial novel Anil’s Ghost, an influence that reaffirms the importance of the travelogue–transnationalism link that I advance in the discussion of Lisle’s ideas in my Introduction. Before addressing a series of questions about Ondaatje himself, though – his self-identification as prodigal–foreigner, his envisioning of the transnational Anil, and his development of this transnational understanding of the personal into communal ideas of reconstruction – I must address the historical and imaginative development of the country itself: one reason behind the transnationalism of Ondaatje’s Sri Lankan work is that the island itself has long been a transnational space, a fact that predates Ondaatje’s work by millennia.

II A Short History of Sri Lanka

Historical studies of the body of land lying above the equator and below the tip of the Indian subcontinent, known at various points in its history as Ceylon, Tambapanni, Taprobane, Sarandib, and much else,¹ are not especially common; the island’s incarnation as the post- independence nation of Sri Lanka, and the ethno-political struggles that continue to divide the country, are equally poorly documented. K.M. de Silva’s A History of Sri Lanka (1981) is still the most recent comprehensive historical survey, and his preface asserts that his is the first such volume since the work of the Irish historian Sir James E. Tennent, mid-nineteenth-century colonial secretary of Ceylon: ‘remarkable, but only too true’ (de Silva, 1981, vii). Critics’ coverage of the recent civil war has been less sparse, yet no more general. Most focus on the ethnic foundations of the war (see various authors in the next few pages), or on specific cultural manifestations (Qadri Ismail, 2005, and Minoli Salgado, 2007, take a literature-centred approach to the island’s history); the only comprehensive historical and cultural overview is Jonathan Spencer’s collection of essays (1991), over two decades old. This is all the stranger since the country’s position ‘athwart the main sea-routes of the Indian Ocean’ (de Silva, 1981, 4) makes it of prime strategic interest, in both trading and military terms; more so than any other island, Great Britain not excepted (Tennent, 1859, I, xix). In order to see how this dearth of material is an indication of Sri Lanka’s transnational position, it is necessary to analyse various impulses both within and outside the country. I believe that conflicting ethnic and racial ideologies within Sri Lanka have combined with the imposition of ideas about the island from abroad to present Sri Lanka as a combination of presence and absence, information and ignorance, surfeit and lack – dichotomies undermining singular definitions of Sri Lankan national identity. These binaries present the island as founded on networks of interrelation and paradox, giving rise to an aesthetically, historically, and politically transnational space – it is with these combinations that Ondaatje engages.

The two ethnicities perceived to form the island’s indigenous population, Tamil and Sinhalese, dominate academic output on Sri Lanka’s history of conflict. The title of A. Jeyaratnam Wilson’s work is typical, yoking the nation with these ethnic groups: The Break-up of Sri Lanka: The Sinhalese–Tamil Conflict (1988). Jonathan Spencer goes one step further, defining the country in terms of the ‘central ethnic conflict’ between ‘the rival Sinhala and Tamil communities’ (1991, 8; emphasis added). Finally, when Stanley Tambiah describes ‘the historical movement of Sinhalese–Tamil relations’ as ‘the Sri Lanka problem’ (1986, ix), the two ethnicities are lumped together and then, metonymically, made to stand for the whole country. These presentations collapse into a Sinhalese–Tamil binary a complex set of relationships that in fact involves far more parties: the Sri Lankan population, as Spencer later admits himself, is composed of ‘Sinhala […] Sri Lankan Tamil […] Indian Tamil, and […] Muslim’ ethnicities (1991, 14). Ignoring this diversity, prevailing criticism on Sri Lanka presents the country as synonymous with two of the many ethnicities it contains, enacting a metonymy whereby the Tamils and Sinhalese represent the entirety of the island.

Quite apart from the damaging ethnic implications of this generalising away of diversity, however, there is a historical reason to refute such metonymy: in de Silva’s account of Sri Lankan ‘prehistory’, he states that Tamils and Sinhalese were both immigrants to the country, arriving only around 500 years before the start of the Common Era (1981, 13). Although the two ethni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Travel Writing and Transnationalism
• Part I Travelling Out
• Part II Travelling On
• Conclusion: Transnational Literature on the Move
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index