Longing for Love and Light
"He is a saint. I think. A despairing saint. Are there such things? Our desire is to protect them."
(Hana in The English Patient, p.45)
What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is a caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shapes of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.
(Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers, p.95)
In how far does the quote by Leonard Cohen stand up to the comparison of the English Patient with a saint? Is he indeed a saint as described by Cohen, or is he something else? This essay will try to build a case for Almásy being a saint through careful examination of quotes and passages in The English Patient in order to determine whether the assumption is plausible or not.
To begin with the Cohen quote, has Almásy achieved a remote human possibility related to the energy of love? To be able to give an answer to this question there is the need to define the meaning of what a remote human possibility is exactly. For the purposes of this essay it will suffice to define the term as being some kind of miracle, though not in the Christian sense, where it has come to mean �God making His presence known on Earth�. Rather, it is a miracle in the sense that it is a dedicated act by one devoted human being, which has a profound and lasting effect on other people. In this Almásy appears to have succeeded. His collaboration with the Germans had a specific purpose, and that was to take Katharine away from the Cave of Swimmers, to take her with him. This action by Almásy also explains the link between the remote human possibility and the energy of love, as it was nothing more than love that made him undertake these actions of his. Despite that Katharine breaks up their affair after some time by saying: "We will never love each other again. We can never see each other again. [�] Never again. Whatever happens." (pp.156-157) And despite Almásy saying on page 158: "I just want you to know. I don�t miss you yet." It is clear that he misses her, and that he still loves her. However, he cannot express that anymore, since, as it says on page 150: "For him all relationships fell into patterns. You fell into propinquity or distance." And Katharine had fallen into distance. It is only when Almásy pulls Katharine into the Cave of Swimmers that they express their love for each other again:
In the cave, after all those months of separation and anger, they had come together and spoken once more as lovers, rolling away the boulder they had placed between themselves for some social law neither had believed in.
(The English Patient, p.171)
Kiss me, will you. Stop defending yourself. Kiss me and call me by my name.
(Katharine in The English Patient, p.173)
And indeed, that he shows that he loves her still when he gives her mouth-to-mouth respiration:
I leaned forward and with my tongue carried the blue pollen to her tongue. We touched this way once. Nothing happened. I pulled back, took a breath and then went forward again. As I met the tongue there was a twitch within it.
(The English Patient, p.260)
Now, is this the energy of love that Cohen means? Does this love result in "the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence", or does Almásy make an attempt to "dissolve the chaos", to "set the universe in order"? Katharine gives the best evidence that he does not dissolve the chaos:
You think you are an iconoclast, but you�re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.
(The English Patient, p.173)
The interesting thing here is, of course, that, according to Katharine, Almásy sees himself as an iconoclast � someone who attacks established beliefs and customs, someone who takes down the images of saints, someone who does try to set the universe in order. However, there is more to being an iconoclast than cuckolding someone�s wife, or misbehaving in a bar (cf. pp.244-245). Almásy is not someone who attacks established beliefs; he does not pull down the images of saints. He does not dissolve the chaos, but he does not find a balance in the chaos of existence either. Not when they were lovers, nor when they had broken up:
And there was her fear of her husband, her belief in her honour, my old desire for self-sufficiency, my disappearances, her suspicions of me, my disbelief that she loved me. The paranoia and claustrophobia of hidden love.
(The English Patient, p.239)
He didn�t trust her last endearments to him anymore. She was with him or against him. She was against him. He couldn�t stand even her tentative smiles at him.
(The English Patient, p.172)
However, the question remains whether Almásy is in balance. Does he ride the "drifts like an escaped ski"? Does he allow himself to be a victim of fate, or does he fight against it? Almásy seems only to accept his fate when he is no longer in a position to do anything about it; when he is burned. Before this happens, he does appear to be fighting against his fate, for example when Clifton makes his suicide-murder attempt:
A husband gone mad. Killing all of them. Killing himself and his wife�-and him by the fact there was now no way out of the desert.
(The English Patient, p.173)
His fate here appears to be to die in the desert, there and then, but he fights against it and travels the desert to go for help. There he does not get any help from the English as they think he is a spy and arrest him:
They were using these wicker prisons, size of a shower. I was put into one and moved by truck. [�] I was just another possible second-rate spy. Just another international bastard.
(The English Patient, p.251)
The book does not disclose how, or if, he escapes, or whether he is released, but in any case, he does not accept this fate as he turns to the Germans for help:
"Too much happened in El Taj in 1939, when I was rounded up, imagined to be a spy."
"So that�s when you went over to the Germans."
(The English Patient, p.253)
On the other hand, these actions, as well as many others, could be seen as corroborating with what Cohen says when he writes: "His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock." The arrangement being that he cannot fly back, so he has to walk back, and that he cannot get any help from the English, so he gets help from the Germans, actually giving "himself to the laws of gravity and chance."
Ultimately, however, these actions are still little more than resisting fate, although it is not Almásy�s fate, but Katharine�s. In spite of his actions to try to rescue her from the desert, she perishes there, and also his efforts to bring her with him after she died are futile as they crash in the middle of the desert. Almásy accepts this:
He is old. Suddenly. Tired of living without her. He cannot lie back in her arms and trust her to stand guard all day all night while he sleeps. He has no one. He is exhausted not from the desert but from solitude.
(The English Patient, p.175)
It is from this point in time on that he seems to have become lethargic in accepting his fate, almost careless were it not that somewhere within him, especially when he is amongst the desert tribe, is a will to live, perhaps even a love of the world. Or as Cohen put it:
His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shapes of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart.
(Beautiful Losers, p.95)
Indeed, he loves the world and its people, and this is where he is most like a saint, having lost everything, but still being able to love. Especially, but not exclusively, loving those things that he has forever lost:
I do not believe that I entered a cursed land, or that I was ensnared in a situation that was evil. Every place and person was a gift to me. Finding rock paintings in the Cave of Swimmers. Singing "burdens" with Madox during expeditions. Katharine�s appearance among us in the desert. The way I would walk towards her over the red polished concrete floor and sink to my knees, her belly against my head as if I were a boy. The gun tribe healing me. Even the four of us, Hana and you and the sapper.
Everything I have loved or valued has been taken away from me.
(The English Patient, p.257)
On the same page, Almásy has offered the thought that he might be a curse upon the people and landscapes he comes into contact with, but these directly voiced thoughts go against what he implies about himself, namely that he is a kind of saint. He goes about it in a roundabout way, first of all when he says: "I think when I see him at the foot of my bed that Kip is my David." (p.116) This David is on a painting by Caravaggio (1573-1610) about which Almásy remarks:
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.
(The English Patient, p.116)
By mentioning these things, he suggests that he sees a younger version of himself in Kip. Later on, Hana writes about Kip in one of the books in the library and so reveals something else Almásy said about Kip: "The Englishman says he�s one of those warrior saints." (p.209) These two things in combination thus indirectly reveal that, in some way, Almásy sees himself as a saint as well. However, as Hana told Caravaggio, Almásy is not a warrior saint, but almost the opposite of a patron saint, a despairing one: "Our desire is to protect them." (p.45) This desire to cherish can also be found in the works of Leonard Cohen when he writes about one particular saint, Joan of Arc, and it is this saint to which Almásy is connected in some significant ways.
Although it has been offered that the burning Almásy falling into the desert is an echo of Lucifer being cast down into Hell, it is possible to take a more literal interpretation of the event, namely someone burning. In this view there is a similarity between him and Joan of Arc, since she too was burnt. Secondly, neither was said to be a saint before they were burnt; only after their most literal baptism of fire was the idea offered that they could be saints. Moreover, they both had the English for an enemy, and they helped this enemy of the English in their wars. In addition, in both cases the English wanted them dead:
They were supposed to pick you up and kill you in the desert. But they lost you. [�] We had mined the hidden jeep. We found it exploded later, but there was nothing of you.
(The English Patient, p.255)
Their final point of similarity is that their names were made English in the end. The nationality associated with their names ultimately killed them, simply because their nationality was not English, and Almásy became the English patient while Jeanne d�Arc became Joan of Arc.
It can even be said that both Almásy and Joan of Arc are despairing saints, that she too lost her hope and confidence, since, when faced with burning at the stake, Joan of Arc recanted; she publicly renounced what she believed in.
Hana�s observation of Almásy being a saint is a correct one in the light of Leonard Cohen�s definition of what a saint is. Interestingly enough, the traditional definition of sainthood is entirely inapplicable to who Almásy is. His deeds were not especially holy or worth of honour in the eyes of the Christian church, nor was he a very good and completely unselfish person, like a traditional saint ought to be. Nevertheless, for a man who loved against all odds, no other title could describe him nearly so well.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cohen, L. (1966) Beautiful Losers, Black Spring Press Ltd, London, UK.
Cohen, L. (1993) Stranger Music, Selected Poems and Songs, Jonathan Cape, London, UK.
Dafoe, W., Michael Ondaatje on The English Patient, in: Bomb, Winter 1996
Essays On Canadian Writing: Michael Ondaatje Issue, Volume XXII, Number 1, March 1995, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Canada.
Ondaatje, M. (1987) In the Skin of a Lion, Picador, London, UK.
Ondaatje, M. (1992) The English Patient, Vintage Books, New York, USA.