Indeed, let’s ban all sense of poetry, theme, Big Ideas, and gawds forbid, metaphors and images from the language! Reality TV writing for all! How about the novelization of _Burlesque_, for starters? No more sweating over form or content, no more furrowed brows as we try to decide if the writer is telling us we’re stupid, no more “boring” writers telling us “boring” stories in language we hate…In fact, why bother to read books at all?

How ornamental is the exclamation mark turned right-side-up? How different the sentiment in courier than sans serif? How white in the comment box.

.. and was never able to get through In the Skin of a Lion;l I know people who loved the movie since it meant they didn’t have to read the book.

A Reader’s Manifesto
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-reader-apos-s-manifesto/2270/

1. The convention of reading books cover-to-cover has wasted too much time that could have been spent reading a better book. If it seems like crap, stop reading and move on! (for other tips, see “How to Read a Book” by Adler & Van Doren).

2. George Elliott Clarke writes some of the best prose and poetry in Canada. Hands down.

3. Will Ferguson is quite clever and funny. Is he too old to be part of the new breed?

The sad thing is it seems writing isn’t considered “literary” or publishable by many Canadian presses unless it’s boring in the way that Fugitive Pieces and other such stories are “great”. And that’s too bad. There’re many writers who won’t catch a break because of that foolishness.

Working Thesis:

Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, as a historiographic meta-fiction, manipulates temporal, spatial and narrative contingencies to re-produce and re-present the violence and terror of a specific historical moment in Sri Lanka, its on-going civil war. In so doing, the text ironically, and perhaps unwittingly, warrants two distinct readabilities that are, for the sake of simplicity though with caution, I shall tentatively term “informed” and uninformed” readerships. For the uninformed reader—one who is either partially or completely unfamiliar with the social, political, historical and cultural contexts of Sri Lanka or its various conflicts—the novel offers what is apparently a well-researched and seemingly sincere account of the conflict. The text employs various strategies to assert its authenticity; its numerous geographical and archeological allusions, its comparable proficiency or at least a familiarity with Singhalese, and its insistence on the merits of meticulous research (as implicit in the Acknowledgements) to excavate discernable “truths” all serve to strengthen its persuasion.. However, for the informed reader—one who is familiar with all or parts of various socio-historical contexts—Anil’s Ghost seems to be a “shameless act of appropriation, essentialism, distortion [and]/or blatant prejudice” (Kanaganayakam). Since such duplicitous readability inevitably provokes the question to whom—that is, to which readership—the novel makes its arguments, the purposes of its post-modern techniques, particularly its historiography and self-referentiality, are rendered problematic. This paper will argue, therefore, that depending on the informed or uninformed position of the reader, the self-referential elements implicit in the text both corroborates and contradicts the novel’s arguments about Sri Lanka and its civil war.

Well before even one succumbs to the hypnosis induced by its “inappropriately beautiful”, brutally savage and potentially dangerous passages, Anil’s Ghost deploys a subtle rhetoric to blur the boundaries between historical authenticity and historiographic fiction. In the page containing bibliographical data, a decidedly ambiguous declaration troubles a careful reader:
This is a work of fiction. Characters, corporations, institutions and organizations in this novel either are product of author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously without any intent to describe their actual conduct. (np)
In other words, the note promptly informs the reader that the novel essentially contains no ‘historical truths’, but if , in case, it does make any historically verifiable references, then all such ‘historical realities’ are unintentional. In short, the declaration seems to absolve the novel from any sort of responsibility, while deliberately aligning fact with fiction. Similarly, the scripter too makes an ambiguous statement illustrating that “Anil’s Ghost is a fictional work set during this political time and historical moment…while…similar events took place, the characters and incidents in the novel are invented”. Thus, the scripter makes a problematic link between historical fact and historical fiction. Such declarations seem to assert that Anil’s Ghost, while being ultimately fictitious, is nonetheless based on potentially historical ‘facts’. Such acts denote that at the very least, the novel is a literary analogy, a metaphor for a specific “historical moment”. While such ambiguity must signal all readers to approach this text with extreme caution, I will argue that its appeal to the uninformed reader as well as the scepticism produced within the informed reader both stems from the novel’s shrewd manipulation of history and historiography. However, such a technique is neither unique nor particular to Anil’s Ghost. It is a token of most post-modernist literature. Nor is there anything particularly dangerous or misleading about it when it is done purposefully to challenge dominant, master narratives of history or to illustrate that all historical facts are ultimately the result of competing versions of counter-histories. But, it becomes, problematic when a novel exploits historiography solely for the sake of its post-modernity, only to string together an aesthetically pleasing tale. Because the reality of the Sri Lankan civil war is not a contested issue, because the president was indeed assassinated by a suicide-bomber during a political rally, because the mass graves, the abductions, the killings and the ceaseless terror were so fundamentally, for all sensory assumptions of reality, legitimate to those who underwent, perished or survived them, such wanton claims to historical authenticity and historiographic mimicry are dangerous indeed for they run the risk of fictionalising unspeakable human atrocities for the sake of aesthetics. Whether or not Anil’s Ghost take this obscene risk is, of course, contingent on the particular readership and the functions of its post-modernity.

At this juncture, we need to explore the function of the novel’s other post-modern trope of self-referentiality both from informed and uniformed perspectives. Since the novel has already established that events, incidents and characters are fictional though with historically demonstrable doppelgangers, it presents the uninformed reader with a predicament: if the novel is ultimately fictional, to what extent does it conceals or distorts actual events? Moreover, if the novel is finally a product of the author’s imagination, what techniques does it employ to represent Sri Lanka as “verbatim”, and Sri Lanka as the novel imagines it? To the uniformed reader, confronted with a plethora of Singhalese words that are largely left untranslated, and a panoply of geographical and archaeological data readily identifiable and can indeed be validated in world maps, the internet, or in the Culavamsa, if one is so inclined, the novel is the ultimate authority –or rather the base-text—on the Sri Lankan conflict, with which the reader must pits his or her awareness and ignorance. In his essay “In defence of Anil’s Ghost”, professor Kanaganayakam points out that an immigration lawyer in Toronto cited the novel as evidence to illustrate the political climate of Sri Lanka on the premise that it is a historical artefact on the conflict. The professor observes that “in such cases the novel is not simply a representation of the real. It is real to the extent that its accuracy cannot readily be questioned. In this case, the novel takes on the status of a document whose representation is sufficiently authentic to be considered a form of evidence”. This is precisely the danger that I speak to when I question whether or not the post-modernity of Anil’s Ghost is indeed misleading and if it is ultimately dangerous . Consider, for instance, how the novel make truth claims as its historiography is rooted in such unshakably western concepts of objective reality as geo-political determinacy and how it invokes rustic authenticity via its use of English-rendered Singhala.

On the other hand, such bombardment of geographical and archaeological date, and even most of the Singhalese phrases produce an entirely different effect on the informed reader. Such a reader is hardly unfazed precisely because the text now offers something tangible to apply his or her native’s knowledge. Indeed it allows him or her to test and inevitably challenge not only the truth claim the novel seems to make but also its capacity for re-presentation as well. For instance, the initial dialogue between Anil and the driver at the airport upon her arrival produces multiple readings. Once landed in Sri Lanka, after having left it for “fifteen years” (Ondaatje 9), she immediately contemplates “drinking some toddy before it’s too late” (9). For informed and uninformed readers, this exchange has very different implications. Toddy is type of cheap, rancid, natural alcohol derived from the fermented sap of young coconut flowers. Typically, its consumption requires an idle curiosity, a highly acquired palate and/or desperate times. Naturally, as far as tourists are concerned, it is quintessentially a token of Sri Lankan folk culture as it were. In fact, Anil’s wish to drink some toddy is in many ways analogous to an Irish expatriate lusting after a pint of Guinness upon arriving in Ireland after a long exile. The scene is therefore both crass, and in short, a glorified stereotype. Additionally, at the risk of generalizing, toddy drinking is a social phenomenon closely imbued with class implications. Generally speaking, no middle class Sri Lankan, especially from such a respectable family as that of Anil, would ever consider drinking Toddy in public, except, perhaps in an adolescent rebellious mood. Furthermore, toddy tapping, is a vocation reserved especially for the poor and generally for those inhabiting the lowest social strata of all Sri Lankan races. Unaware of such cultural nuances implicit in this seemingly innocent request of Anil, the uninformed reader recognizes perhaps a nostalgic tendency in Anil. The informed reader is not so sure. How can she or he interpret this exchange since it seems ironic and improbable that Anil would want to drink Toddy after having shunned all things Sri Lankan for fifteen years and because it seems to wantonly reinforce a tasteless stereotype? On a metafictive level one naturally wonders whether the text is corroborating with its ideal, uninformed, western reader, to depict Sri Lanka orientalised according to western imagination. Perhaps perceiving the irony, again metatextually, the driver quips “Toddy…first thing after fifteen years. The return of the prodigal” (9-10). It seems that either Anil is unaware of such irony, or deliberately ignoring it. Again, on a metafictional level, this is the precise position of the reader as well. The uninformed is unaware of the local nuances, and the informed silently cringes at the insult. Thus, the text implicitly links Anil’s experience simultaneously though differently with both readers. Implicitly this exchange renders Anil liminal figure, positioned ambiguously and simultaneously as an insider and outsider to the Sri Lankan social historical condition in the eyes of her different readers.

The function of such irony—rather that which is inherent in self-referential or metafictive moments is prevalent in the story—proves difficult to discern precisely because it means differently for the informed and the uninformed. Consider, for example, the exchange between Sarath and Anil en route to the newly discovered skeletons at Bandarawela.
[Sarath]: “You know I’d believe your arguments more if you lived here, he said. You can’t just slip in, make a discovery and leave”.
[Anil]: ‘You want me to censor myself’
[Sarath]: I want you to understand the archeological surround of a fact. Or you’ll be like one of those journalists who file reports about flies and scabs while staying at the Galle Face Hotel. That false empathy and blame. …
[Sarath] “That’s how we get seen in the West. Its different here, dangerous. Sometimes law is on the side of power, not truth”. (44)
This exchange is rife with post-modern self referentiality. We can read such an exchange as an argument the text makes for the sake of its own rhetoric, to reinforce its persuasion for the uniformed reader. In this specific exchange, the uninformed reader, the outsider, metafictively participates in the text’s argument through Anil. From the position of the informed, Sarath insists that to understand the situation one must comprehend the “archeology”—meaning, the various contextual contingencies—of the “fact”. It is as if Sarath intentionally seeks to diffuse and give contextual meaning to such a simplistic, though aesthetically pleasing remark as those that Anil makes in the previous page “reason for war is war” (43). It seems that Sarath, the informed participant of this conversation, wants to assert that without knowing the contingencies of “truth” or such universally applicable “truisms” such as “the reason for war is war” (43) are both dangerous and misleading. It would seem, then, the novel is making a claim against itself, as if wanting to resist being seen a certain way, according to popular Western assumptions of South East Asia as a place for “flies and scabs”.

But, on the whole, the novel offers no such contexts for the civil war. While the uninformed reader may extrapolate that at the midst of all this chaos, the government is more culpable since the task of Anil is to indict the government with mass murder after all, the text remains reserved and rather neutral in its politics. It reduces the intricate ethnography and complex ethno-history of the Sri Lankan civil war into something according to a UN profile of a civil war country situated anywhere from North East Africa to South East Asia: “It was a hundred Years’ war with modern weaponry, and backers on sidelines in safe countries, a war sponsored by gun-and drug-runners. It became evident that political enemies were secretly joined in financial arm deals” (43). Indeed, despite its poetry, the universality implicit in such eloquent simplification of geopolitically specific and complex historical moments is evoked in the very first pages of the novel. It is not until half way down the page do we realize that this moment in Anil’s past has happened not in Sri Lanka, but rather in Guatemala (5) In retrospect, this historical moment, if we chose to ignore the reference to Guatemala, reads identically to one occurring simultaneously in Sri Lanka, or any country torn by civil wars for that matter. For, Anil’s ghost, in its opening page, seems to make the argument that, at best, human atrocity is universal, and, at worst, one human tragedy is allegorically identically to another. The later, of course, not only deprives socio-historical and socio-cultural context of “atrocity” but also denies the victims, their very humanity. Ironically, Anil continues to insist that “one village speaks for many villages. One victim speaks for many victims” (275),but even after positive identification, the now resolved mystery of Sailor fails to indict the government.

Similarly, the potential solution proposed by the novel’s placid passivism too yields contrasting readings for the informed and the uninformed. The reconstruction of the vandalized bodhisattva and Ananda’s final act, “this sweet touch from the world” (307) both alludes to, the uninformed reader, a humanist approach to this seemingly senseless violence. This compassionate gesture implicit in the Buddha image and explicit in Ananda’s touch is obviously a desirable scenario and the reader can readily accept it as a plausible one. However, for the informed reader, the resurrection of the Buddha image speaks something altogether different than compassion. To him, it speaks of race riots, anti-minority sentiments and even invokes the resurgence of those various forces of evil that roam the bloody streets of Sri Lanka. Even the Buddhist monks, sworn to a life of retreat and compassion, were heavily involved assuaging religio-ethnic hatred. The resurrected Buddha, within the Sri Lankan historical context of ethnic divide, does not offer a compassionate alternative. Rather, it signals the resurrection and indeed the continuation of violence. The uninformed reader need only to look at S.J Tambiah’s essay, “Buddhism Betrayed?” to get a glimpse of the extent to which Buddhist monks and Buddhism itself was engaged in fostering ethnic divide. With respect to this alternate perspective on the resurrected Bodhisattva, Ananda’s gesture seems not as one of compassion but one of hopelessness. The novel’s proposed solution then, with the proper context, seems futile and pathetic.

Also, through Ananda, it seems the novel is making another case for its rhetoric metatextually. Like Ananda, the artist who gives a compassionate face to this one face (of sailor) which stands for all faceless victims, the novel too seek to put a human face to unspeakable violence. In so doing, it seems to me, that it makes the argument that art can somehow transcend, and perhaps even transcend violence. While Ananda’s facial reconstruction indeed results in a positive identification it amounts to nothing more than the mutilated body of one of the novel’s most enduring characters. Sarath, one who acutely loves country despite its schizophrenic penchant for bloodshed, one who instinctively understand that to help Anil will cost his life, makes the ultimate sacrifice for what is otherwise an empty jesture by the artist (of Sarath, as well as Anil’s Ghost). For all its arguments for art and its transformative properties, all that remains is yet another tortured Sri Lankan corpse. What then, I ask, is the purpose of Anil’s Ghost’s aesthetics? Is this merely post-modernity for the sake of post-modernity? Can Art ever be the justification for itself especially with respect to historical representation?

Works Cited and Consulted
Derrickson, Teresa. “Will the ‘un-truth’ Set You Free? A Critical Look At Global Human Rights Discourse in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost”. LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory. 15.2. Jan 2004. p131(21).
Kanaganaykam, Chelva. “In Defense of Anil’s Ghost” Ariel 37.1. Calgary: Jan 2006 .p5(22).
Ondaatje, Michael. Anil’s Ghost. Toronto: Vintage, 2001.
Rati, Manav. “Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and the Aestheticization of HumanRights”. Ariel. 35.1-2. Calgary:. Jan-April 2004. p121(19)
Scanlan, Margaret. “Anil’s Ghost and Terrorism’s Time”.
Studies in the Novel (Univ. of North Texas, Denton) (36:3) [Fall 2004] , p.302(15)