ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the connection between Michael Ondaatje’s own English education and his cosmopolitan aesthetics. It argues that Ondaatje does not so much revise the strategies and tropologies in Rudyard Kipling’s fiction as transpose them. The chapter suggests that the dichotomy is less between “western” and “non-western” than between, on the one hand, an identitarian logic that underlies Anil’s forensic work as well as her attempt to reconcile her Western and Sri Lankan selves, and, on the other hand, Ondaatje’s fictional methods. The English Patient evades the traditional alignment of Englishness with national and imperial identity. Englishness, for which literary education served as its most powerful vehicle, thus came to be both exclusively national and potentially universal. The English Patient suggests another trajectory for this modulated Englishness: rather than nationalism, it is cosmopolitanism that takes a powerful hold on Ondaatje’s narrative imagination.
