June 20

2:00 PM - 3:45 PM

2.A.05

Marie-Christine Leps

Abstract: This interdisciplinary paper argues that Michael Ondaatje’s two WWII novels (The English Patient [1992] and Warlight [2018]) explore the complex matrices of power, knowledge, and desire that lead to war, in order to provide the reader with altering experiences. His narratives generate modes of apprehension that reconfigure individual, regional, national, and transnational sovereignty. It is well-known that the idea of Europe as integrated economic and political zone emerged after WWII as an anti-war strategy. Ondaatje’s fiction returns to this time to make the reader feel, and know, why Europe is not enough... His novels correlate biopolitical assemblages of individuals and families, in love and hate, to state-sanctioned illicit operations of information gathering, torture, and murder; they trace how warring sovereign nations damage survivors cross-generationally; they expand the war’s reverberations to deep time (foregrounding the pertinence of Herodotus for twentieth-century warcraft); in other words, they expose the effects and afterlife of loving power, scaling up from the personal and intimate to the transnational and worldly.

To read Ondaatje’s novels is also to reread the classics of world literature and (high and pop.) culture, fiction and non-fiction, which are insistently recalled and woven into their own narrative unfolding. Displaying how stories of “those running away from or running towards a war” (EP 93) are valued and circulated transhistorically brings to light the limits of political and economic plans from above, and calls the reader neither to sovereignty nor to arms, but to “an elaboration of self as a practice of freedom” (Foucault).

Disciplines: Comparative Literature
Philosophy

Substantive Tags: Ethics and Morality, Identity and Ethnicity, Immigration/Migration, Institutions, International/Global Relations

Research Networks: None of the Above

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