Katabasis and the politics of grief in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost

Abstract

In this article, I argue that while Anil’s forensic work in Sri Lanka can be read through the lens of detective fiction, it can also be read through a very different lens, namely that of katabasis, or descent into the underworld. Seeing herself as a detective, Anil attempts to enact a powerful fantasy of invulnerability that allows her to distance herself from both the victims and the perpetrators of the crimes she sees. The text itself, though, suggests a different reading, one Anil seems only to recognize very late in the novel. In this alternative reading, Anil’s time in Sri Lanka is a descent into the underworld, a descent that mirrors the experience of grief. In this light, her journey is a realization of shared vulnerability, shared human precarity. The recognition of a shared human exposure to harm is, I argue, also the opening up of a different kind of politics.

Introduction

Readers enter Sri Lanka in Ondaatje’s novel via the perspective of Anil Tissera, a forensic pathologist and human rights investigator who sees herself, at least at first, as a kind of detective figure. A detective, according to the rules of the genre, enjoys a special immunity both from death—the detective is effectively immortal—and, of course, from guilt—the detective can never be implicated in the crime. In detective fiction readers imaginatively share this special immunity, so that they always maintain a distance from the potentially victimized or potentially murderous characters. It is precisely this special invulnerability to harm and guilt that Anil believes she possesses and that the novel initially appears to offer its readers. And yet, as several other critics have pointed out, this detective fantasy is undermined in the novel and exposed as a source of more violence and more destruction. ¹ Anil is not immortal, nor is she free from blame, and by extension, neither is the reader. Rather than allowing its readers to engage in fantasies of distance, objectivity, freedom from guilt, and immortality, then, Ondaatje’s novel returns its readers again and again to our own corporeality, our own embodied exposure to harm and grief, the ways in which we are always already involved or, better still, “intervolved” in the lives of others just as they are “intervolved” in our lives. ² To put this another way, rather than allowing its readers to transcend their bodily lives in powerful narrative fantasies, the novel seeks to engage us in the corporeal experience of grief—an experience which is figured in the novel as a kind of descent into the underworld or katabasis.

Fantasies of invulnerability

The context of Anil’s investigations in Sri Lanka is quite different from the controlled, safe setting of classic detective fiction, and yet, at the outset, Anil insists on a detective epistemology. She positions herself as the rational, scientist/detective able to see the Sri Lankan situation through “a long-distance gaze” (2001a: 11). ³ As Teresa Derrickson points out, Anil presents herself as perfectly objective, employed by an “independent organization” and writing “independent reports” (Derrickson, 2004: 139). She claims that she inhabits a position outside of the context of the war itself where, Sarath insists, “we all have blood on our clothes” (48). Anil imagines that she is untouched by guilt. She also imagines that she is safe from harm, and indeed, she is somewhat less likely to die than her Sri Lankan colleagues. The combatants in the Sri Lankan civil war would think twice about assassinating Anil since she is a citizen of a first world nation employed by the UN. Ondaatje’s readers, of course, are mostly similarly insulated. As in a classic detective story we partake of the detective’s special immunity from guilt and death, or more accurately, we appear to do so.

As the story goes on, however, it becomes more and more clear that this immunity is more fantasy than reality. As Derrickson points out, Anil extrapolates outward from the scientific facts she learns about Sailor to “truths” about the Sri Lankan situation as a whole, and she fails to recognize that these “truths” are inevitably partial and politically charged (2004: 142). She believes that she is telling “the truth,” but what she doesn’t see is that this “truth” doesn’t take into consideration what Sarath refers to as “the archeological surround of a fact” (44)—the context in which this “truth” is given meaning (Derrickson, 2004: 142). Her “truth” fails to recognize, for example, the ways in which Western corporations profit from the Sri Lankan civil war: the combatants have all been importing “state-of-the-art weapons from the West” (Derrickson, 2004: 143). And her “truth” also fails to conceptualize her own implication in the country. She worries only about her ability to find “the truth”; she doesn’t recognize that her own life is in danger and, indeed, that she is endangering the lives of others. The fallacy of Anil’s detective immunity, the fantasy of invulnerability that she believes in and seems to offer readers collapses fully and explicitly near the end of the novel. When she is interrogated by a group of Sri Lankan government officials, Sarath is forced to discredit her in order to save her life. The result, of course, is that he is himself assassinated.

Anil’s distancing maneuvers betray the darker workings of her human rights investigation. As Žižek argues in The Metastases of Enjoyment, the West’s lurid fascination with the suffering of those caught up in civil war and ethnic conflict (he is specifically discussing the siege of Sarajevo), betrays a kind of Sadeian fantasy in which suffering is “externaliz[ed]” in the figure of a relentlessly tortured and beautiful victim, a victim who is “fixed outside time and empirical space” (1994: 213). The compassion those in the West are encouraged to feel for this victim has the effect of “maintain[ing] a proper distance” (1994: 211) between “us” and “them”. We seek to maintain this distance, Žižek continues, because:

The unbearable is not the difference. The unbearable is the fact that in a sense there is no difference: there are no exotic bloodthirsty ‘Balkanians’ in Sarajevo, just normal citizens like us. The moment we take full note of this fact, the frontier that separates ‘us’ from ‘them’ is exposed in all its arbitrariness, and we are forced to renounce the safe distance of external observers[.] (1994: 2)

It is just this unbearable lack of difference, I argue, that Ondaatje insists his readers register. Even as we read about the victims of the Sri Lankan conflict, a reading experience that could allow us to engage in the Sadeian fantasy Žižek describes, Ondaatje consistently seeks to undermine this fantasy by returning us, again and again, to our own shared precarity. ⁴

“[T]arrying with grief”

While Anil’s fantasy of invulnerability is only fully demolished near the end of the novel, Ondaatje has been steadily and subtly undermining it from the very beginning. The experience of reading the novel is one of profound tension between the narrative Anil wants to tell—which comes out in her conversations with Sarath, Palipana, and Gamini—and the experiences she is actually having, a tension, in other words, between the story Anil wants to create for herself and the story Ondaatje tells.

Judith Butler suggests the crucial difference between these two narratives in Precarious Life. In that influential volume, she describes a fantasy of invulnerability that aligns very closely to the distancing maneuvers of the detective novel. She writes:

In a way, we all live with this particular vulnerability, a vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden address from elsewhere that we cannot preempt. […] [A] denial of this vulnerability through a fantasy of mastery (an institutionalized fantasy of mastery) can fuel the instruments of war. (2004: 29)

Butler is describing, here, the United States’ response to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, and she goes on to describe how, on September 21, President Bush gave a rousing speech arguing that the time for grieving was over and the time for action had come. She argues that the fear and grief that inevitably followed the realization of American vulnerability was very rapidly banished by the Bush administration by taking military actions that were designed, at least ostensibly, to reinstate a previous order (and/or to give the impression that there was order before the tragedy) (2004: 29–30). While I don’t wish to suggest a simplistic equivalence between American military aggression and Anil’s human rights work, I do think the fantasy of invulnerability that her obsession with “the truth” depends on operates in the same way. Michael Ondaatje himself suggests this, when he argues, in an interview with Peter Coughlan: “The truth! One of the things I wanted to get at was that we in the West have a tradition of believing that there are always answers, always solutions. American foreign policy is based on that belief” (2001b: n.p.).

Butler goes on to imagine what a possible alternative to this dangerous and violent fantasy of invulnerability might look like. She wonders:

Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability and not endeavoring to seek a resolution for grief through violence? Is there something to be gained in the political domain by maintaining grief as part of a framework within which we think our international ties? If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another? (2004: 30)

It seems to me that this is the alternative posited by Ondaatje as well. If we read the novel not according to the story Anil hopes to tell but rather according to the experiences she actually has, we can see that despite her stance as the “outside observer,” Anil is a vulnerable human being like everyone else in the novel, exposed to harm and grief. Indeed, I argue that the story Ondaatje tells here is a story that seeks to inhabit this state of human precarity and, more specifically, the reality of grief.

Defining grief

While Butler never names a clear distinction between “grieving” and “mourning,” and indeed she seems to use the two words interchangeably, it is clear that she questions Freud’s notion of successful mourning. She writes “I do not think that successful grieving implies that one has forgotten another person or that something else has come along to take its place, as if full substitutability were something for which we might strive” (2004: 21). In her doubt about the idea that mourning can be finished or successful in the way that Freud originally implied, Butler is following a number of recent theorists who interrogate the troubling politics of mourning. This recent interest in the potentially regressive uses of mourning has arisen in the wake of Derrida’s original intervention in Specters of Marx and has gathered steam with postcolonial revisions of trauma theory. One of the major critiques raised by these scholars is that successful mourning can operate in the service of a historical amnesia that seeks to assimilate violent histories into dominant narratives (of nationalism, for example, or more broadly of progress). ⁵ Another important critique, one more central to my argument here, is that Western constructions of mourning insist on seeing trauma and loss as an individual phenomenon that must be dealt with on an individual level. As Stef Craps points out, this is particularly problematic in societies which are not highly individualistic (2013: 28). To make his point, Craps points to Ethan Watters’ research on the effect of Western trauma councilors working in Sri Lanka after the devastating 2004 tsunami. Watters argues that Sri Lankans tended not to experience the trauma of the tsunami as psychological damage but rather as a terrible break-down in social relations, so it was deeply problematic to go about healing these people individually through conversations with strangers (Craps, 2013: 23).

In my own discussion of traumatic loss in Ondaatje’s novel, I want to insist on grief as something quite different from mourning. Following Ananya Jahanara Kabir, I argue that our reliance on Freudian terminology limits the ways in which we are able to think through these questions (2014: L2073). Kabir calls for the avoidance of Freudian concepts and terms by examining how “the traumatized subject us[es] the resources of the body to re-embed itself in place” (2014: L2073). On a similar note, I argue that with its etymological ties to the Latin gravare and gravis and its former meaning: “[t]o press heavily upon, as a weight; to burden” (OED “grieve”), grieving captures the corporeal experience of loss. In returning us to bodies, grief resists the abstraction of death that proper mourning depends on for its success. And in this regard it’s worth noting that Ondaatje is interested, here, not just in ghosts, but also in corpses. Marc Redfield argues that “[t]he corpse marks death’s resistance to its own universality, recalling the inassimilable particularity and finitude of this death, the absolute of an irrecuperable loss” (2003: 57). At the same time, however, it is in our bodies that we are bound up with those around us, that we are exposed to one another, composed of one another, that we begin to understand ourselves beyond the limiting constructions of individual subjectivity (whether we live in individualistic cultures or not). Butler calls this “the fundamental sociality of embodied life, the ways in which we are, from the start and by virtue of being a bodily being, already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own” (2004: 28). By returning us to our bodies, I want to argue, the concept of grief as I work through it here, resists fantasies of invulnerability and abstractions of death, while also allowing us to conceptualize how loss might be experienced not individually, but socially, and how a recovery from loss might take a social rather than an individual form.

Katabasis

As I have suggested in the introduction to this essay, this alternative story of grief and vulnerability takes the form of a descent into the underworld or katabasis. The whole novel is framed as a journey in the land of the dead, and the epigraph of the miner’s folksong begins this framing. ⁶ By comparing the sheave on the mine’s headframe to the Buddhist “life wheel” (which evokes the cyclical nature of death and rebirth), the song suggests that the descent into the mine is also a descent into the realm of death (3). The opening passage of the novel, set in a Guatemalan grave, continues this framing. From the outset this descent is linked with the precarious limbo period after a person has died. As Robert Hertz has pointed out in an influential essay, many funerary rituals across the globe acknowledge a period after a death in a community when the dead and the living exist in a kind of limbo (1960). The dead are not yet fully integrated into the world of the dead (and they may hang about the world of the living in the form of ghosts) (1960: 36). At the same time the bereaved relatives no longer fully inhabit the world of the living (1960: 38–39). The scene in Guatemala signals to us that we are entering this liminal space inhabited, precariously, by both the living and the dead:

One day Anil and the rest of the team walked to a nearby river to cool off during their lunch break. On returning they saw a woman sitting within the grave. She was on her haunches, her legs under her as if in formal prayer, elbows in her lap, looking down at the remains of the two bodies. She had lost a husband and a brother during an abduction in this region a year earlier. Now it seemed as if the men were asleep beside each other on a mat in the afternoon. She had once been the feminine string between them, the one who brought them together. They would return from the fields and enter the hut, eat the lunch she had made and sleep for an hour. Each afternoon of the week she was a part of this. (5–6; italics in original)

The dead have crossed into the world of the living, here—uncannily napping as they used to every afternoon when they were alive. But the woman herself has entered the world of the dead –she is crouched in the grave, in the underworld.

In Ondaatje’s novel this descent into the world of the dead is a figure for a shattering grief that is itself a kind of death, a total loss of self. Judith Butler suggests this living death in her explanation of the experience of grief:

It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there, especially if the attachment to ‘you’ is part of what composes who ‘I’ am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. […] On one level, I think I have lost ‘you’ only to discover that ‘I’ have gone missing as well. (2004: 22)

It is Anil’s job, I will argue, to enter this underworld, to descend into the world of the dead, partly so that others, like the Guatemalan woman, might be able to leave it.

Ordinarily the dangerous limbo period between life and death comes to an end when the dead person settles into the underworld, and when the living are able to reintegrate into ordinary life in their community (Hertz, 1960). But this dangerous liminal state is lengthened indefinitely in the world of Ondaatje’s novel because the “disappeared” remain both dead and not-dead. They are gone, but their loved ones can never be sure they are actually dead. They haunt those left behind, permanent specters, unable to settle into the world of the dead. Their loved ones, meanwhile, continue to inhabit the netherworld of shattering grief, unable to turn back to the world of the living and community life: “This was the scarring psychosis in the country. Death, loss, was ‘unfinished,’ so you could not walk through it” (56). It is Anil’s job, in this sense, to settle the dead in the world of the dead. By finding and identifying corpses, she is able to tell the person’s relatives that he has actually died and to turn the disappeared from a perpetually haunting specter into a dead person –to take the person out of the permanent limbo between life and death and enter him, once and for all, into the realm of the dead.

While this is a deeply important task for the relatives of the disappeared, in that it opens up the possibility of a return to the world of the living for them, it is also of broader, political significance. As Alice Nelson notes of the Chilean situation: “It is important to remember that, from the moment of their disappearance, missing people were relegated to a perverse limbo in which the State not only denied their deaths, but also attempted to negate their lives, by claiming that the disappeared never had existed” (2002: 50). Proving that the disappeared have died, then, also demonstrates that they were once alive. It insists on their personhood in the face of a discourse that wants to rob them of it. As Judith Butler suggests, their position as ghosts or as specters is not just in relation to the grief experienced by their loved ones; it is also a political position. She argues that the “Other,” the enemy, the terrorist is “derealiz[ed]” in the discourse of the state—rendered into a kind of undead—always animated and dangerous but not human, not ever fully killable:

If violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so must be negated again (and again). They cannot be mourned because they are always already lost, or, rather, never ‘were,’ and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness. Violence renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its object. The derealization of the ‘Other’ means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral. (2004: 33–34)

By insisting on the death of Sailor, by proving his deadness, then, Anil effectively “realizes” him—insists that he was a real human being with a real life and a circle of people around him. She turns him from a ghost, a haunting spectral figure of the “Other,” into someone, a person to be grieved.

It is clear, though, that the “someone” that he was is not captured in the individualizing markers Anil locates such as age, place of residence, and occupation. As Chakravorty puts it: “The usual ways of memorializing individual deaths that denote a singular, subjective life […] become insufficient for explaining the losses that are incurred” (2013: 542). The persistent blurring and doubling of identities between Sailor and other characters—Sailor and Ananda’s wife Sirissa in the head Ananda makes, Sailor and Sarath as the “ghosts” Anil carries, Sailor and Ananda as two bodies marked by working in the gem mines—suggests that what is lost is not an individual human subject but a person composed of interactions with others, indistinguishable, in many ways, from those connections and relationships. By settling the dead, as I have called it, Anil is not paving the way for proper mourning. ⁷ It isn’t possible to mourn such a loss since there is no individual ego to assimilate loss to. There can be no return to an illusory “self” that existed before the loss because that “self” was composed in large part of interrelations with the one who is lost. That “self” is dead. And yet it is possible to return to the world and the land of the living, and I will discuss this return in more detail at the end of this essay. For now, though, I want to explore Anil’s implication in this web of interconnections, how Anil inhabits her own exposure to others.

In order to perform the difficult task of turning wandering ghosts into merely the dead, the task of, as I have called it, settling the dead, Anil must herself enter the world of the dead. She must descend into a kind of underworld, and she must learn not to keep a distance between herself and others. Anil takes on the role of the bereaved relative here, as is suggested by the extraordinary intimacy she seems to feel with corpses and specifically the corpse of Sailor: “Honey, I’m home, she would say, crouching beside a corpse to ascertain the hour of death” (19). At the same time, however, Anil is grieving her own losses during this trip to Sri Lanka. She too has lost loved ones –her parents have died in a car crash since she left Sri Lanka; her friend Leaf is “dying unmoored” (255), and her relationship with her lover Cullis has ended only days before she leaves for Sri Lanka. This relationship with Cullis in particular is repeatedly tied to her work with Sailor. Cullis is called a tinker twice in the novel (37, 264), which links him to the group of skeletons of which Sailor is a part (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor). Cullis is one of the skeletons in Anil’s closet, so to speak, one of the corpses she carries. And her intimacy with Sailor is repeatedly linked to her intimacy with Cullis. In the walawa, for instance, she listens to one of Steve Earle’s “songs of furious loss” and finds herself unable to bear the thought of Sailor being wrapped in plastic. She goes out and unwraps him “so the wind and all the night were in [him]” (169). Immediately after this her thoughts turn to Cullis lying beside her (169).

For Anil, too, this “furious loss,” this grief is experienced as a kind of death. Anil’s journey to Sri Lanka is a journey through the underworld not only because the civil war has created so many casualties, turning Sir Lanka into what Chakravorty calls a “postcolonial crypt” (2013: 550) or what Achille Mbembe calls a “death-world” (2003: 40), but also because she is undergoing the living death that is grief. We see this very clearly in her fevered dream:

They taped down sheets from the Sunday Observer so the pages covered the floor. You have the felt pen? Yes. She began removing her clothes, her back to him, then lay down next to the skeleton of Sailor. […] He was using the felt marker to trace her shape. […] She could feel the pen move around her hands and alongside her waist, then down her legs, both sides, so he linked the blue lines at the base of her heels. She rose out of the outline, turned back and saw he had drawn outlines of the four skeletons as well. (61–62).

The passage is integrated into her waking interactions with Sarath so that there is no indication it is a dream, at first, apart from Ondaatje’s use of italics. It is only when Anil wakes up that we realize she has been dreaming. The sense of herself as a corpse, as one of the dead she and Sarath are working with is evident here. Anil’s death-like grief blurs with the grief of Sailor’s loved ones, with the death of Sailor himself, and, beyond this, with all those who die and those who grieve them.

An intertextual allusion near the beginning of Ondaatje’s novel suggests just what Anil stands to gain on this journey, an experience not of “objective” truths discovered through the maintenance of a “long-distance gaze,” but rather a recognition of paradox, of mystery, and of interconnection. Near the beginning of Anil’s investigations, she muses: “To fetch a dead body: what a curious task! To cut down the corpse of an unknown hanged man and then bear the body of the animal on one’s back…something dead, something buried, something already rotting away?” (56). This is a direct quote from Heinrich Zimmer’s The King and the Corpse in which he gives a reading of the South Asian folk tale of the same name. This reference—the image of carrying a corpse on one’s back—clearly suggests Anil’s own relationship to Sailor here. Anil’s suspicions of everyone around her, and her sense that Sailor will not be safe if she leaves him alone, makes it so that she very nearly does carry his corpse on her back throughout the novel (everywhere she goes from the Grove of Ascetics, back to Colombo and the Oronsay, and then to the walawa). When she refuses to leave Sailor to go to a temple with Sarath, he laughingly accuses her of this, saying: “What do you want to do? Take it wherever you go?” (52).

But in order to understand the full impact of the allusion, we need to look closely at the tale itself. The folktale tells the story of a king who becomes indebted to a (false) monk. In order to repay his debts, the king agrees to do what the monk asks. The monk tells him to come to a particular funeral ground (where criminals are hanged and bodies are cremated) late one night, but when the king does so, it is clear that he has entered a kind of hell-scape or underworld. The monk tells the king that he should go to the other side of the funeral ground, pick up the corpse of a hanged man and bring it back across the funeral ground to him. The king obediently crosses the hell-scape, finds the corpse and puts him on his back to carry him, but as soon as the king begins to walk again, a ghost within the corpse begins to speak. The ghost tells the king a story, and when he is finished, he asks the king a question about the story, threatening him with the claim that if he knows the answer but doesn’t respond his head will explode. When the king answers, the corpse disappears from off his back and magically appears back at the tree. The king is then forced to return to the tree and start the whole process over again. The corpse tells the king 24 stories and asks him 24 questions. Each time the king responds, sending the corpse back to the tree.

The king is only able to carry the corpse all the way across the funeral ground when he doesn’t answer one of the questions, thereby admitting to his own ignorance, or, more broadly, to the paradoxical nature of the stories. There is no answer to them; they are mysteries which cannot be solved. The king is only truly wise, in other words, when he falls silent. He must embrace, what, according to John Fudjack and Patricia Dinkelaker, is called “not knowing” in Buddhism. ⁸

When, as a result of the 25th riddle, the king can HOLD the contradiction that is at the core of a paradox in mind—without either being dumbfounded or feeling compelled to reach for a facile ‘answer’ that smoothes the problem over—he increases his capacity to consciously appreciate the core ‘mystery’. It is this that empowers him to enter the mandala. (1999: n.p.)

This is what we might also recognize as a move away from the position of “the subject supposed to know” (Žižek, 1991: 57), the subject who stands at a critical distance from his task and “objectively” evaluates meaning and truth, a move, in short, away from the position of the classic detective.

But the nature of the paradox is also crucial here. The stories that the corpse tells are wonders of identity confusion—filled with doubles and relationships that are impossible to disentangle. In one story a man and his friend chop off their heads (as sacrifices to the Goddess Kali) and the wife of one of the men accidentally replaces the heads on the wrong bodies. The corpse asks which man is which (Zimmer, 1948: 210). ⁹ In another story a father and son marry a daughter and mother and each couple has a son. The corpse wants to know how the two sons are related to each other (Zimmer, 1948: 211–212). The king continuously attempts to define who is who, how everyone is related, who bears the responsibility for which acts. But he finally begins to see that the people in the stories cannot be disentangled from each other; each person is made up of all the other people, and there is no way to differentiate, to distance them. As Zimmer puts it in his analysis of the folktale: “Nothing is far from us. Nothing can be treated as alien. When we put distance between ourselves and another, we are at fault, and the consequences will be ours” (1948: 225).

It seems to me that in Anil’s final appearance in the novel, Ondaatje repeats the king’s ultimate silence in the face of this vision of impossibly entangled human interconnection. In this final scene, a “ghost” speaks to Anil from out of the corpse she has been carrying. The tape-recorder of Sarath’s final message is placed within Sailor’s chest cavity. And in the face of this ghostly voice speaking its message of confusion and connection, Anil falls silent. The novel also falls silent on the subject of Anil at this moment, a move which forces the reader to inhabit this silence. The reader, too, like Anil and the king in the folktale must hold these mysterious interconnections in mind without reaching for an explanation.

The return to the world of the living

Anil is not the only character in the novel who undergoes a katabasis; the man she hires to make a reconstruction of Sailor’s face, the artist and miner Ananda, also does so. Indeed, it seems to me that both Anil and Ananda follow a similar journey—a descent into the underworld that is designed to settle the dead—and both grieve for themselves and for others. Even more explicitly and more directly than Anil, Ananda’s katabasis is both his own shattering grief for his wife, a grief that is itself a kind of death (and indeed almost results in his death) and a broader effort to give peace to the dead, to help them sleep calmly in their graves. And yet Ananda, unlike Anil, also suggests a possible way out of the land of the dead, a way of effecting a return to the land of the living

Once again the descent into the underworld is associated with a descent into the depths of the earth—the descent into the mine. Our first encounter with Ananda is a fragment that depicts his arrival at the pithead early in the morning. The imagery here strongly suggests a graveyard populated by ghosts: “mounds of fresh earth” dot the landscape and “[w]ith the dark-green light of morning around them the men appeared to float over the open landscape” (91). Ananda’s daily work on the reconstructed head repeats this daily entry into the underworld. He squats in the same position to work on the head as he does in the gem mines, and the song Anil cruelly surprises him with in his drunken stupor, Tom Waits’ “Heigh Ho,” is, of course, a mining song. His response to hearing it captures some of the terror of this descent into the world of the dead: “he rose off the floor terrified. He was hearing, he must have thought, voices of the dead. He reeled, as if unable to escape the sounds within him” (169).

Anil, as we have seen, attempts to rise above grief and death through story. She tries, in other words, to transcend the body and its vulnerability, its precarity, through narrative only to have that narrative falter and fall silent. Ananda, on the other hand, doesn’t try to transcend the awful vulnerability of the body, to escape the embodiment that leaves us so exposed to others and to their loss. He negotiates his grief as an embodied being. The text emphasizes this by rendering Ananda almost silent (a result of the fact that he and Anil don’t share a language and so cannot talk to each other). His grief takes the form of corporeal, ritualistic behavior. If, like Anil, he seeks to settle the dead in the world of the dead, to give peace to the dead beloved, he does so using the resources of his body. He squats each day in the posture of a miner and recreates the head:

In the afternoons when Ananda could go no further with the skull’s reconstruction, he took it all apart, breaking up the clay. Strangely. It seemed a waste of time to [Anil]. But early the next morning he would know the precise thickness and texture to return to and could re-create the previous day’s work in twenty minutes. Then he thought and composed the face a further step. It was as if he needed the warm-up of the past work to rush over so he could move with more confidence into the uncertainty that lay ahead. (171)

This physical work allows Ananda to create a face that is “serene,” possessed of “a peacefulness he wanted for any victim” (187). It allows him to give the dead peace, in other words. It also allows him, as the passage above suggests, to move forward into the unknown. If the descent into the underworld is a figure for the experience of grief—an experience of shattering that is a kind of death in itself. And if this shattering is a recognition of an absence where the self should be (because the “self” is exposed as merely a complicated series of relationships and sets of interactions), then the return to the world of the living is not the reconstruction of an illusory individual “self,” but the reconstruction of relationships and interactions with others, a turning back toward the world. This can only be done through an openness to others, by inhabiting one’s own exposure, by living one’s bodily precarity. I think we get some sense of this reconstruction in the final pages of Ondaatje’s novel with the piecing back together of the Buddha statue.

The shattered pieces of the Buddha lie in a “mud trench, which resembled a hundred-foot-long coffin” (301), and the field where the pieces lie is effectively a mass grave, a dumping ground for bodies (300–301). But the team of villagers, Ananda included, slowly build something that allows them to move away from this grave, this underworld, away from the war itself. The work of rebuilding the Buddha statue helps Ananda and the team of villagers avoid getting sucked into the war. Ananda, we are told, “knew if now he did not remain an artificer he would become a demon. The war around him was to do with demons, spectres of retaliation” (304). For the villagers, too, “[i]t was safer to be working for a project like this, otherwise you could be pulled into the army or you might be rounded up as a suspect” (301–302). The “something” they build together is not so much the Buddha, as it is contact with one another, shared experiences. The novel insists that we register their bodily presence and exposure to each other and to the world:

The women distinguished the stones, which slid wet from their hands into the grid. It rained for more than a month. When the rain stopped, the grass steamed around them and they could finally hear one another and began to talk, their clothes dry in fifteen minutes. Then the rain would come again and they were back within the noise, silent, solitary in the crowded field, the wind banging and loosening a corrugated roof, trying to unpeel it from a shed. (302)

This is hardly a utopian vision of community, and yet the novel suggests that it is this corporeal work, day in and day out, rain and shine, next to each other in the field, that could create a different future. As in Ananda’s work on reconstructing the head of Sailor/Sirissa, this physical work allows for the possibility of movement forward into the unknown, but this time this work is shared and the future they are moving into will be shared too.

Through the story Anil wants to tell about her time in Sri Lanka, a story of an objective Western observer who enters a war zone and catalogues the crimes being committed there, Ondaatje suggests, at first, that his novel will be a familiar narrative that allows its readers to share the outside observer’s (or the detective figure’s) special immunity to bodily harm and to guilt. But once he has lulled us in with this comforting fantasy, he unravels it, exposing us, through Anil, to the reality of our shared human vulnerability, our shared corporeal precarity. Rather than telling a story about other people’s suffering, a story that helps us distance ourselves from that suffering, Ondaatje insists that his readers inhabit the reality of “embodied sociality”—the reality that we are composed of our connections with others, that we are all tied up together in ways we cannot begin to consciously comprehend. The novel makes clear that this “embodied sociality” exposes us all not only to death but also to losses that are so devastating as to be the equivalent of our own death; because we are composed of our relationships with others, when we lose those others, we lose ourselves as well. And yet it is this very corporeal vulnerability and exposure to others that makes it possible to return to the world of the living after suffering such catastrophic losses. By inhabiting our bodily vulnerability, and opening ourselves to others, it is possible to create the connections that will give us new life. In the opening pages of Ondaatje’s novel, in the scene in the Guatemalan grave, we, as readers, are encouraged to experience the embodied sensation of grief: “There are no words Anil knows that can describe, even for just herself, the woman’s face. But the grief of love in that shoulder she will not forget, still remembers” (6). The passage returns us to our own bodies. It invites us not only to see that shoulder but also to feel the weight it bears. In the final words of the novel, however, when Ananda’s young assistant places a “concerned hand on his,” we are reminded that our bodies expose us not only to terror, pain, and grief, but also to the connections that create and sustain us. We are returned once again, here, to our own embodiment, where we too might feel “this sweet touch from the world” (307).