Physiognomy of War: Ruins of Memory in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost Lichung Yang In his best-known essay “On the Concept of History” (1940), Walter Benjamin envisages the figure in Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus as the angel of history who casts his gaze on the past, seeing “one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet” (392).1 Benjamin conceptualizes his- tory as a disaster with piles of debris that grow higher and higher as time goes by. His view of history as piles of wreckage of capitalism not only expresses his questioning of the linear view of history and progress but also reveals his apocalyptical vision of history, regarding it as a process of decay and degeneration. Despite the strong storm that drives the angel irresistibly into the future, however, Benjamin emphasizes that the angel of history would like to stay in an attempt to “awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed” (392). If the angel is emblem- atic of a materialist historian who refuses to face the future but keeps looking back to the past, then his attempts also convey Benjamin’s belief in some kind of light or hope of salvation latent in the piles of debris. His angel of history, caught and struggling in the whirlwind of progress, exhibits a paradoxically ambivalent attitude toward history — extremely melancholy yet embracing some hope of salvation. This particular view of history as piles of debris is exemplified in Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost, which portrays the civil war that penetrated the heart of Sri Lankan society for more than twenty-five years. The conflict seemed to be hopelessly long and bitter when the novel was published in 2000.2 Ondaatje’s fictional reworking of the Sri Lankan civil war offers a powerful example of a writer who stages or interprets the atrocity and complexity of war in an intricate and aesthetically perceived form. The novel stands, to adapt Benjamin’s phrase, as an “allegorical way of see- ing” into war (Origin 166), which discloses itself through a variety of arresting images of ruins wrought by human violence on a vast scale. Since initial publication, Anil’s Ghost has elicited conflicting responses informed by strategic positions that come to be marked or anil’s ghost 167 polarized as political or apolitical, historical or ahistorical.3 In addressing this controversy, Chelva Kanaganayakam acknowledges the contentious nature of the debates, noting that Anil’s Ghost anticipates controver- sial responses “through its overt preoccupation with a complex political backdrop, as well as a carefully articulated ambivalence about its pro- ject” (5). A review of a range of readings of the novel also suggests that the difficulty for most critics has revolved around how to place Anil’s Ghost, which potentially compels bifurcation of the wide readership along lines of cultural identity or cultural knowledge. The controversial responses seem to reveal more about the strategic positions of critics than about Ondaatje’s engagement with political violence in the novel. As a novel “establishing a careful balance between political engagement and aesthetic distance,” Anil’s Ghost, Kanaganayakam argues (6), “offers political engagement without taking sides, and without the realism of mimetic detail,” but “problematizes the events it painstakingly describes” (20). He is right to suggest that the novel insists on its artifice because it is the capacity of art to transform reality that “enacts a realization that the personal, the political, and the social are intertwined in ways that problematize clear ethnic, religious, or ideological categories” (16). Although my understanding of Anil’s Ghost resonates with Kanaganayakam’s position, my contribution to this conversation is to read Ondaatje’s novel along with Benjamin’s reflections on history, as defined in his oeuvre. Despite being six decades apart, there is an affin- ity between Ondaatje’s fictional account of war and Benjamin’s idea of history. For Ondaatje, the dilemma of how to represent the victims of a long, bitter war in Sri Lanka stands at the heart of Anil’s Ghost, given that for Benjamin the allegory of ruins emblematizes the history of modern Europe. In a land plagued by decades of political instability and armed conflict, unseen wounds are intertwined with physical injuries and fatalities, creating fragmented communities that share a vulner- ability to the haunting uncertainties. A sequential or mimetic narrative of war does not adequately convey the ongoing turmoil in a war-torn country. In what follows, I trace how Benjamin’s theoretical reflections on history shed light on Ondaatje’s thematic and formal treatment of the political violence with a wide array of images of ruins. Teasing out these images in Anil’s Ghost will enable the reader to appreciate the way in which Ondaatje’s famously fragmentary and ambivalent narrative inscribes the longer- and shorter-term processes of political violence 168 Scl/Élc that leave their traces in types of ruins. As will be seen, what emerges from a reading of Anil’s Ghost in light of Benjamin’s concept of history is a collage of images of ruins — from remnants, material debris, and ruined landscapes to scarred, wounded bodies and in particular the social ruination of people’s lives. Ruin and Allegory The ruin is usually connected with abandoned, decayed monuments or bleak, desolate spaces, and this kind of space or architecture can often be seen as an image typical of the past. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin takes the ruin as a theoretical venue to understand modern history, exploring the aesthetic of the ruin in literature and connecting it to historiography. Given that ruins express the fragility and impermanence of things, Benjamin argues that ruins presented in the Trauerspiel (“the mourning play”) not only are architectural residues but also mean that all cultural and social desires eventually succumb to time and history. He asserts that human history is a mere part of natural history, inevitably subject to nature, in which all human labour becomes extinct. In the literature of the baroque, nature, Benjamin writes, is “not seen . . . in bud and bloom, but in the over-ripeness and decay of her cre- ations” (179). Following this line of thought, modern history should be understood as part of natural history and found in ruins from the past. In these ruins, not only can the decline of the individual in the natural state of destruction be observed, but also history can be glimpsed and explored at the present moment. The ruin therefore not only is histor- ical debris or remnant in itself but also presents itself as a venue for the formation of human history. “In the ruin,” Benjamin writes, “history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay” (178; emphasis added). In Benjamin’s philosophy of history, the ruin is not only emblem- atic of history but also a form of allegory. Benjamin contends that the ruin and allegory have an affinity to each other. In an often-quoted passage, he notes, “Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things” (Origin 178). Whereas life is a process of decay and destruction, subject to natural history, allegory, to a certain extent, is a form of ruin subject to time. In allegory, the meaning of an anil’s ghost 169 object is torn apart, subject to a process of mortification, scattered to “the manifold regions of meaning” (217). Just as the living body of the sovereign is subject to the agony of dismemberment in martyrdom at the hand of a torturer, so too is the human body reduced to a corpse the ultimate representation of its natural history. The body of a creature is likewise dismembered by the baroque dramatist so that the fragments can be imbued with meanings and associations. In the field of allegory, Benjamin states, “The false appearance of totality is extinguished,” and “the image is a fragment, a rune” (176). The fragment, or the forsaken object, in this sense, becomes a “rune,” a silent secret or hidden mys- tery. Analogically, he believes that the truth content of a work of art will be revealed only when its material content is torn apart, because the function of allegory is “not so much to unveil material objects as to strip them naked” (185). He puts it concisely: “Criticism means the mortification of the works” (182). To demystify a work of art and dis- rupt the unity of its form, some of his works, such as those found in The Arcades Project, are stylistically comparable to the fragmentary remains of a magnum opus. Benjamin also asserts that only when a large number of fragments are accumulated is the true meaning of the creaturely condition likely to come across: “It is common practice in the literature of the baroque to pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal, and in the unremitting expectation of a miracle, to take the repetition of stereotypes for a process of intensification” (Origin 178). The meaning of allegory thereby resides in the oscillation between two or more dis- crete images. Benjamin emphasizes that allegory, like natural history, is “dialectical in character” (166). The form of allegory is changing, and so is its meaning. Allegory is rich in meaning: “any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else” (175). In other words, even the smallest details can be meaningful. In Benjamin’s terms, allegory is not a rigid or pedantic metaphor but a lively, open form of literary expression. Most importantly, Benjamin accentuates that the measure of time is crucial in allegory, in which time finds expression in nature mortified, in “the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape” (166). Therefore, history appears in allegory as nature in decay or ruin, and the temporal mode is “one of retrospective contemplation” (Buck-Morss 168). But if the ruins of the Trauerspiel disclose a melancholy view of the 170 Scl/Élc world, this disclosure does not mean that Benjamin holds an entirely pessimistic view of history. Unlike the melancholy nature of Trauerspiel, allegory for Benjamin is an important approach to historiography. He believes that one of the strongest impulses in allegory is “an appreciation of the transience of things, and the concern to rescue them for eternity” (Origin 223). Historiography, like Trauerspiel, should “veer about slowly into a question of form,” the form of allegory, in the sense that allegory is “the dominant mode of expression of a world in which things have been for whatever reason utterly sundered from meanings, from spirit, from genuine human existence” (Jameson 71). War as an Allegory of Ruins Ondaatje intends in Anil’s Ghost “[t]o study history as if it were a body” (193). Benjamin’s allegory of the ruin has important implications for our understanding of Ondaatje’s fictional recounting of the Sri Lankan civil war in the novel. The protracted war straddling the divide between the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century escapes simple categorization.4 A Sri Lankan Canadian writer such as Ondaatje is well aware of the complexity of the conflict and seeks to find a narrative form that recognizes it, names it, and understands it as a significant site of narrative. The civil war encompasses not just outbreaks of war that occur randomly in time, and explosively and spectacularly in space, but also the invisible impacts of war that are incremental, their repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. For Ondaatje the writer, a central question is how to convert into image and narrative the calam- ities wrought by the long war on human bodies and lives, calamities that turn into haunting memories. Anil’s Ghost is a serious novel that engages the representational and narrative challenges posed by the complexity of that long, bitter war, which officially ended in 2009. If the ruin is often associated with the fragmentary and the imper- fect, then Anil’s Ghost can be seen metaphorically as a text composed of a wide array of narrative fragments. Ondaatje’s works are best known for different types of discontinuous, fractured narrative.5 In Anil’s Ghost, the linear development of a narrative collapses, and the main narrative breaks into fragmentary narratives to cope with the division of society wrought by the war.6 Unlike the National Atlas of Sri Lanka in which each template reveals only one aspect of the island, the novel is a mosaic anil’s ghost 171 of aspects of different characters, and each narrative section is independ- ent, without clear temporal transitions among them. Speaking of his fiction writing, Ondaatje indicates that he is interested not in inventing a form but in small moments or tiny reversals of emotion. Those small discoveries for him are the first principles, and he tries to “circle around them and collect them and piece them together in some kind of mural or novel. Magpie work” (“Michael Ondaatje: An Interview” 242). In his creation of Anil’s Ghost as piles of textual ruins, Ondaatje also incorporates heterogeneous textual fragments, including both fic- tional narratives and documentary modes. Michel de Certeau considers “entombment” a figure for historiography, noting that writing is a tomb in the double sense of the word in that, in the same text, it both honours and hides (101). His view of the entombment of historical writing is pertinent to our understanding of the historical files embedded in the fictional narratives in Anil’s Ghost. The historical files contain a brief note by M.O. before the fictional narrative, a long list of names in the acknowledgements, and a bibliography following the main narrative. There are also inserted facts and statistical figures, such as a list of the dead, including name, age, and date, time, and place of death (41), along with maps with no depiction of human life (39-40). In terms of de Certeau’s notion of entombment, the intratextual tension among the dispersed archives suggests, on the one hand, the dead-and-gone past that becomes part of the historical archive and, on the other, “its haunt- ing refusal to close its eyes and leave the living alone” (Westerman 371). If narrative fragmentation is emblematic of the ruination of the text, Anil’s Ghost goes further to employ constellations of architectural images to present the long-term effects of the Sri Lankan civil war.7 Because a certain parallel exists between architectural relics and his- torical traces, crucial scenes in the novel feature images of architectural ruins, suggesting what Benjamin calls the threat of “irresistible decay” (Origin 178). In Anil’s Ghost, the Oronsay, formerly a passenger liner travelling between Asia and England, is transformed into Sarath and Anil’s base for archaeological investigation. But it still contains “the smells of salt water, rust and oil, and the waft of tea in cargo” (18). The vessel was berthed in an unused quay at the north end of Colombo harbour, but a section of the transformed liner is used as their storage space and work lab, “claustrophobic, the odour of Lysol in the air” (19). To find out Sailor’s identity, Sarath and Anil go to a walawwa, 172 Scl/Élc a two-hundred-year-old house where the young Gamini was brought to stay when he was expected to die of diphtheria. The building is no longer inhabited, and “like a well that has gone dry it took on a sense of absence” (164). When Sarath visits the house, the messy emptiness of the building and grounds depresses him, trapping him into existing “in two eras” (165). The image of the forest monastery in Arankale also resonates with Benjamin’s allegory of the ruin. The monastery might have been a secluded retreat for Asanga the Wise and his followers, but centuries later the knowledge of such a monastery vanishes from people’s minds, and the site exists merely as “a haven for creatures that scurried on the warmth of the cut rock and on unnamed plants in this nocturnal world” (190). By amassing images of the deserted passenger liner, the hundred-year-old house, and the relics in the forest, Ondaatje marks different types of architectural ruins, accentuating that “history stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transi- ence. . . . [H]istory has physically merged into the setting” (Benjamin, Origin 177-78). In addition to its images of architectural ruins, which, like natural history, emblematize the transience of human life, Anil’s Ghost fore- grounds the alternative histories hidden in different forms of ruins, merging micro interactions and emotions of ordinary people with macro history. Sarath and his teacher Palipana value the narrative dimensions of the ruins, focusing on the experiences embedded in the modern con- text. As an archaeologist, Sarath sees himself as somehow “the link between the mortality of flesh and bone and the immortality of an image on rock, or even, more strangely, its immortality as a result of faith or an idea” (278). He tells Anil that he loves history, “the intimacy of entering all those landscapes. Like entering a dream,” as if “some- one nudges a stone away and there’s a story” (259). As an epigraphist, Palipana also instructs his adopted orphan Lakma, saying that “history faded too, as much as battle did, and . . . only stone and rock could hold one person’s loss and another’s beauty forever” (104). Fully aware of the subtext of the ruins, he discovers the hidden histories, intention- ally lost, that altered the perspective and knowledge of earlier times. Palipana perceives that it is “how one hid or wrote the truth when it was necessary to lie” (105). Through different perspectives, Ondaatje suggests that the remnants, whether they are relics or inscriptions on rocks, might no longer have instrumental or practical functions, but anil’s ghost 173 they suggest heterogeneous levels of temporality, marking memories of alternative historical significance or value. If the architectural rubble represents the eventual fate of the inorgan- ic, the death’s head or body reduced to a corpse also provides an equiva- lent in the realm of living things. For Benjamin, ruins suggest not only a pile of stones and rubble but also bodies reduced to corpses. The organic succumbs to nature, and so do human bodies. As mentioned above, the allegorical mutilation of the corpse is not for the purpose of salvation but for the purpose of disclosure, the ruined body bearing the truth of the creaturely condition. As Benjamin writes, “The characters of the Trauerspiel die, because it is only thus, as corpses, that they can enter into the homeland of allegory. It is not for the sake of immortality that they meet their end, but for the sake of the corpse” (Origin 217). In other words, the human body reduced to a corpse is more than a corpse: it is a petrified life, a ruin of the organic, and a trace of history. This allegorical way of seeing the human body is relevant to one of the narrative threads of Anil’s Ghost, for Anil is tasked with investigating possible crimes against humanity during the Sri Lankan civil war. In her search for the identity of Sailor, Anil has to admit that Sailor is not just a dead body but also the “representative of all those lost voices,” and therefore “to give him a name would name the rest” (56). As a forensic anthropologist who pursues the factual truth from the skeleton, she acknowledges that “a good archaeologist can read a bucket of soil as if it were a complex historical novel” (151). In the course of her investigation, Anil begins to feel the need to reach forward and lift Sailor into her arms, “to remind herself he was like her. Not just evidence, but someone with charms and flaws, part of a family, a member of a village” suddenly killed in a violent insurgency (170). In Anil’s Ghost, Ondaatje also extends and expands Benjamin’s view of the death’s head as historical trace, enumerating different kinds of injured or ruined bodies to highlight the brutality of the civil war. The narrator relates that the body being reduced to a corpse is “a ceremony of nature” (20), and Anil believes that “the most precisely recorded moments of history lay adjacent to the extreme actions of nature or civilization” (55). The focus of the fictional narrative is not on the direct use of violence by organizations or in regions but on the persecution and wreckage wrought by the war. In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry suggests that killing is the main 174 Scl/Élc purpose and outcome of war, but this self-evident fact is often relegated to a marginal position by being simplified, renamed, or qualified in historical or strategic accounts of a military campaign (71-72). If seeing is believing, then any redescription of the injured bodies illuminates vividly the vulnerability of an armed force. It is no surprise that the sanctioned report of the disappearance of the injured body often turns public attention to the myth of war rather than the sensory reality of war, which exposes the war as organized murder. However, Anil’s Ghost is different from political or strategic accounts; images of broken bod- ies recur throughout the novel. “A couple of years ago,” we are told, “people just started disappearing. Or bodies kept being found burned beyond recognition. There’s no hope of affixing blame. And no one can tell who the victims are” (17); when the outbreaks of war occur from 1983 on, we are told again about “[t]he disposal of bodies by fire. The disposal of bodies in rivers or the sea. The hiding and then reburial of corpses” (43). Because the country “exists in a rocking, self-burying motion,” we bear witness to “the disappearance of schoolboys, the death of lawyers by torture, the abduction of bodies from the Hokandara mass grave. Murders in the Muthurajawela marsh” (157). Confronted with incalculable deaths, Anil cannot help lamenting that “the darkest Greek tragedies were innocent compared with what was happening here” (11). Survivors are also constantly haunted by nightmares of the war. For Gamini, who almost buries himself in the war rooms, there seems to be “little difference between pre-operative and post-operative patients” (120). The only reasonable response to the war is that “there would be more bodies tomorrow — post-stabbings, post-land mines. Orthopaedic trauma, punctured lungs, spinal cord injuries” (120). Characteristically, an innocent civilian sees dead bodies in the street or gets murdered at any time. The day when Sirissa, Ananda’s wife, goes to the school as usual, she sees about ten yards from the bridge “the heads of the two students on stakes, on either side of the bridge, facing each other. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old” (17 4). And she recognizes one of the “two more heads on the far side of the bridge” (174-75). In a land where war spreads “like a poison into the bloodstream” (156), it might not be surprising, but it is still distressing that Sirissa disappears from the world mysteriously without a trace. The sudden disappearance and reappearance of piles of injured bodies, corpses, and skulls resonate vividly with what Benjamin says: “Everything about history, from the anil’s ghost 175 very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face — or rather in a death’s head” (Origin 166). In Anil’s Ghost, Ondaatje not only highlights the death’s head as historical trace but also indicates the difficulties of interpretation of the ruins. Having approached the ruins with the pragmatic aware- ness of locally inherited skills, Palipana is deeply knowledgeable about the ancient cultures and begins “to see as truth things that could only be guessed at” (83). His “gesture” or “strange act” evokes among the archaeologists the question of how to read the ruins (82). Despite his claim that he sees “the half-perceived interlinear texts” (191), the unprovable truth that Palipana offers still has the potential for “for- gery or falsification” without a context (83). “In diagnosing a vascular injury,” one hospital textbook also suggests, “a high index of suspicion is necessary” (118). Detecting the symptoms does not necessarily entail a comprehensive understanding or even overall control, but the scientists cannot be too careful in reading the remains of the past. Similarly, it is a big challenge for Sarath and Anil to identify Sailor from a nameless burned body. As Palipana tells Anil, “We have never had the truth. Not even with your work on bones”; moreover, “most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion” (102). Sarath also warns her that “some- times law is on the side of power not truth” and that it is extremely important to understand “the archaeological surround of a fact” (44). He has seen “truth broken into suitable pieces, and used by the foreign press alongside irrelevant photographs” (156). He is well aware that “a flippant gesture towards Asia . . . might lead, as a result of this informa- tion, to new vengeance and slaughter” (156-57). Anil also understands that her investigation is complicated because of “its three-dimensional chess moves and back-room deals and muted statements for the ‘good of the nation’” (28). Through the different perspectives, Ondaatje draws attention to the obvious but frequently neglected fact that the contexts in which the ruins are understood and interpreted frequently make it a challenge to read the ruins as historical traces. Ruinous Experiences of War “To write history means giving dates their physiognomy,” writes Benjamin in The Arcades Project (476; [N11, 2]). In Anil’s Ghost, Ondaatje not only tackles the catastrophe of war, resulting in large- scale ruins and dead bodies, but also marks the aftershocks of decades