Index:

Herodotus and The English Patient

Thomas Harrison

University of St. Andrews

'This history of mine', Herodotus says, 'has from the beginning sought out the supplementary to the main argument.' What you find in him are cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history - how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how people fall in love....[1]

So says the English Patient in Michael Ondaatje's novel. For the thousands inspired by Anthony Minghella's Oscar-winning film of Ondaatje's novel to rush out and buy a copy of the 'Father of History', the epic sweep of the Histories will be only one of a number of familiar features. There are the stories of marvellous desert winds told by the hero, Almásy (Ralph Fiennes), to the wife of one of his fellow explorers, Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas). Then there is the story of the Lydian king Candaules' showing off his wife's beauty to his lieutenant Gyges (1.8-13), echoing the adulterous affair between Almásy and Katharine. But the connections between Herodotus and The English Patient - I will be treating the book and film as a seamless whole - are more than just the sum of a number of references. Both the structure of The English Patient and some of its themes find echoes in the Histories.

The interplay between the two is often, however, intangible and certainly cannot always, or possibly ever, be put down to conscious allusion.[2] Even the clearest references, for example the story of Candaules' wife, are not as simple as they at first seem. On the face of it, a clear analogy is drawn between Candaules and Geoffrey Clifton (Colin Firth). Almásy lurks in the shadows as Katharine Clifton tells the story, just as Gyges is said to watch from the shadows as the Lydian Queen undresses. The story-telling episode ends with the warning to Katharine's husband 'So Geoffrey - let that be a lesson to you.'[3] Candaules' end comes about, however, because of the excessive passion of Candaules for his wife : 'this Candaules fell in love with his own wife', Herodotus' account begins, as if there were something inherently surprising in this.[4] Whose is the excessive passion in The English Patient, Clifton's for his wife, or Almásy's, Katharine's other husband in her 'different life'?[5] As Almásy later admits, 'she died because of me. Because I loved her.'[6] On the other hand, there are signs that it is Clifton's love that leads to his and Katharine's deaths. There are different sorts of love, the Cliftons tell Almásy on their first meeting: romantic love, platonic love, filial love and uxoriousness, 'excessive love of one's wife'.[7] As Clifton crashes his plane suicidally towards Almásy, he shouts out his love for his wife: 'I love you, Katharine, I love you so much'.

More generally, Herodotus provides the framework for the structure of the film. That is, Almásy's copy of Herodotus does. 'It is the book he brought with him through the fire',[8] the fire that disfigures him and transforms him into the anonymous English Patient. Almasy's Herodotus doubles as a commonplace book into which he pastes photographs, drawings, notes scrawled on Christmas Crackers, even a small fern. These provide the cues for a number of flashbacks illuminating his past, right until the climax of the film when, as he finally dies, his nurse Hana (Juliette Binoche) reads to him, again from the book, Katharine's last words.

The use of Herodotus as a structuring device in this way is particularly appropriate. For just as the film glides back and forth from the war-time present of the Tuscan convent to the pre-war days of desert exploration which provide the backdrop for Almásy and Katharine's affair, so Herodotus too skips from one city or country to another, from one century to another, in a way that is at first bewildering. Herodotus' work, moreover, is itself a kind of scrapbook, for it contains not just the narrative of the war between Persia and Greece, not just the early history of the participants in that war, but a wealth of other information. The notice that a man from the village of Decelea was the bravest Athenian at the battle of Plataea leads him, for example, to retell the other noble deed accomplished by the Deceleans, when they resisted the hero Theseus and gave up Helen of Troy to her brothers (9.73). He also digresses to give accounts of numerous foreign peoples: the Egyptians, the Libyans, the Arabs, the Scythians, to name just a few. He describes their religious customs (their manner of sacrifice, the list of the gods that they worship), their sexual tastes (for example, the manner in which the Ausaeans have sex with one another like cattle, and so allocate children to fathers on the grounds of physical resemblance, 4.180); he is even concerned with the different languages and manners of speech of different peoples (the Atarantes, he tells us, are the only people in the world who have no personal names, 4.184). Throughout these accounts of foreign peoples, Herodotus is concerned not only with the historical past but with the present - albeit it is envisaged apparently as a timeless present.[9]

It is because of these 'ethnographic digressions' that Herodotus is often called the Father of Anthropology as well as of History. But to call such descriptions 'digressions' is, in a sense, misleading, as it carries with it the implication that they are secondary to his main, more conventionally historical, purpose. There is nothing to suggest that he drew any such distinctions between history, anthropology, or geography. Herodotus was concerned simply to sketch the whole range of human experience, or (in his own words) the 'great and wonderful deeds of both Greeks and Barbarians... together with the reason they fought one another.' This is a remit that can include almost anything, not just the actions of men, but their buildings, and also the marvellous events that happen to them: miracles of priestesses suddenly growing beards (1.175), 'amazing-but-true stories' such as that of Arion riding on the dolphin's back (1.23-24).

To call the Histories a commonplace book might also seem to suggest either that it lacks a structure or that Herodotus is devoid of literary artistry. Neither is true. Only occasionally does Herodotus step aside from the sweep of his narrative to gather the strands together into a self-conscious historical conclusion. Often, however, his judgement is implied through more subtle, literary means. Just as Minghella's film opens and closes with the sight of Almásy and Katharine flying in a Tiger Moth over the desert, Katharine 'slumped forward as if sleeping',[10] so the end of the Histories also echoes its beginning. The last main episode of Herodotus' work concerns the gruesome execution of a Persian, Artayctes, for an act of sacrilege in a Greek shrine (9.116-121). His punishment, being nailed to a plank and left to die as his son is stoned before his eyes, takes place by the Hellespont, the border between Asia and Europe. The shrine looted by Artayctes was that of Protesilaus, the first Greek to die in an earlier conflict between Asia and Europe, the Trojan War, with which Herodotus opens his work. Artayctes offers the disingenuous justification for his act of sacrilege that Protesilaus was a man who had stolen the Persian king Xerxes' property: for the Persians, Herodotus explains, hold that all of Asia belongs to them and is under the rule of their king. This is a sentiment foreshadowed in precise detail at the beginning of the Histories (1.4). At the same time, the identity of the man responsible for Artayctes' barbaric punishment points forward to another empire: Xanthippus, the father of Pericles, the Athenian leader at the time of the height of her power.[11] It has happened before, it will happen again, Herodotus seems to be saying. The history of the rise and fall of empires merely moves into another stage.

Similar ironies overshadow the end of Ondaatje's novel. The death of the Patient occurs against the backdrop of the news of the bombing of Hiroshima:[12]They will bury everything except the book. The body, the sheets, his clothes, the rifle. Soon he will be alone with Hana. And the motive for all this on the radio. A terrible event emerging out of the shortwave. A new war. The death of a civilisation. The book, Herodotus' Histories of course, goes on into Hana's new life, a thin thread of continuity, and the only surviving token of the Patient's life.

Just as there are similarities of structure between Herodotus and The English Patient, there are also similarities of theme. Issues of empire and of nationality, for example, pervade both works. Almásy and his fellow explorers form the self-styled 'International Sand Club', a group oblivious to national background.[13] This internationalism is obviously connected with the setting of their exploration: the desert levels them, making behaviour acceptable that would elsewhere be unacceptable,[14] cutting them off from their wives and homes.[15] For Almásy the desert is attractive precisely because of its anonymity: whereas for Katharine 'there was a line back to her ancestors that was tactile', Almásy 'had erased the path he had emerged from'.[16] This idealism cannot withstand the impending war, however. Almásy is contemptuous of the idea that anyone can 'own the desert',[17] but the desert is subsequently 'raped'[18]. At the same time, 'anybody remotely foreign is suddenly a spy', as Almásy's friend Madox warns him, all nationalities are polarised, and Almásy's name leads to him being mistaken for a German ('Count Fucking Arsehole Von Bismarck'[19]) so forcing him into the embrace of Britain's enemy. This has the ironic result, as he later points out, that when he flies to fulfil his promise to Katharine, he does so 'in Madox's English plane with German gasoline'.[20]

On another level, however, the dream of a world without nationality is realised. Katharine, in the note that she leaves Almásy as she lies dying, speaks of an 'earth without maps': 'we are the real countries, not the boundaries drawn on maps with the names of powerful men.'[21] This vision is fulfilled in a number of ways. First, through the final scene of the Tiger Moth cruising over the desert: for (in Minghella's screenplay, at least) the desert itself is the 'earth without maps'.[22] Then through the love, mediated by the English Patient, of Hana and Kip, Canadian and Sikh: Hana 'imagines all of Asia through the gestures of this one man'; together they discover that 'in lovemaking there can be a whole civilisation, a whole country ahead of them.'[23] And finally through the transformation of Almásy himself. As he puts it: 'When I arrived in Italy, on my medical chart, they wrote "English Patient". Isn't it funny, after all that I became English.' For Kip, the patient even represents 'everything that's good about England'.[24]

Herodotus too in may ways seeks to confound national stereotypes. Though he relapses into clichés of decadent oriental monarchs and their slavish subjects, he is also willing to see good in his barbarians. At times he even seems determined to shock Greek opinion by asserting how much of their culture originates in Egypt. But he is also concerned to map and to order the world. As Almásy puts it, 'the histories in Herodotus clarified all societies'. He classifies the different peoples in relation to one another, establishing whether they were indigenous, or the descendants of other peoples who had settled far from home. He marks the boundaries between the continents. And he names peoples. The names of foreign peoples, almost invariably, are traced back to the mythical Greek heroes imagined to have settled the land in question (so, for example the Persians are descended from the hero Perseus).[25] Herodotus' order is a very Greek order then. It is also, to modern eyes, artificially schematic. Herodotus likes to see mirror images in the customs and geography of peoples and lands.[26] But there are, nevertheless, limits to the power of Herodotus' powerful men, to the power of any people to impose themselves. Almásy tells Katharine, as they shelter from a sandstorm, of the Simoom, a wind which 'a nation thought was so evil they declared war on it and marched out against it in full battle dress.'[27] Herodotus completes the story: the Psylli, the people in question, marched out, and the wind blew and buried them in sand (4.173). Other peoples too find natural limits set to their power:[28] the Persian kings Cyrus, Cambyses and Darius each embark on one campaign too many; each attempts to annexe more than their allotted share of land and power. The final Persian campaign against Greece of Darius' son Xerxes is merely the culmination of this process. The idea of the cycle of empires, that hard peoples become softened by power until they become the ruled instead of the rulers (9.122), is one that applies to all peoples, even implicitly to the Athenians, not just to the Persians.

The concern with the significance of naming is also one common to both the Histories and the English Patient. In the novel, Katharine reproaches Almásy for his fear of being named as of being owned, something she considers inhuman.[29] His fear of being named appears to have given way, albeit perhaps too late, by the time of the dénouement in the Cave of Swimmers: 'Kiss me and call me by my name'.[30] By contrast, Katharine is terrified of anonymity: 'She would have hated to die without a name. He was amazed that she had loved him in spite of such qualities of anonymity in himself.'[31] As the English Patient, however, Almásy's anonymity becomes all but perfect. This state of virtual death [32] is pitted against that of Caravaggio, the Patient's interrogator and the man who discovers his identity, a man whose name is simply too 'preposterous', according to the Patient, to have been invented.[33] The name of Hana's lover Kip is also significant, at least within the novel. His real name was Kirpal Singh, but he is known as Kip because of a British officer's unfunny joke about kipper grease.[34] His very name embodies his uneasy assimilation into British culture. His name is also reproduced in the serial number of the bomb that nearly kills him.[35]

In different ways, the names of Herodotus' characters also embody their personalities and destinies.[36] The 'Persians' means in Greek the 'destroyers' (7.220, 8.77; cf. A. Pers. 65), an appropriate name for the men who levelled the shrines of the Greek gods. The name of Harpagus, the commander of king Cyrus responsible for the plunder of the sea-board of Asia Minor, is influenced by the Greek word harpagé, meaning plunder. Sustained play is also made of the name of Cyrus himself, whose name in Greek means 'supreme authority'.[37] Cyrus was brought up by the family of the herdsman Mitradates, having been exposed as a child. Herodotus gets himself into a great tangle over whether this baby was Cyrus or not. 'The baby named Cyrus', Herodotus says, before correcting himself, and saying that he had another name and not Cyrus (1.113.3; cf. 1.114.4). The boy is then discovered to be Cyrus when he is nominated king in a classless playground consisting of aristocrats' and herdsmen's children. His whipping of the son of the aristocrat Artembares brings him to the attention of his grandfather, who realises from the 'freedom' of his replies, from his innate authority, that he must be his grandson Cyrus. His name is discovered at the same time as his kingship, because his kingship is encoded within his name.

The English Patient portrays the stories of individuals against the backdrop of the far greater events of the war. For Almásy there is somehow an analogy between the patterns into which relationships fall and the way in which 'the histories in Herodotus clarified all societies.'[38] The theme of ownership also crosses over onto a personal level.[39] Almásy resists any form of ownership of himself, but then comes to insist petulantly on his ownership of Katharine ('I want the things that are mine. Which belong to me.'[40]) The film also illustrates the way in which individuals can have a disproportionate effect on the lives of thousands of others. As Anthony Minghella has remarked in a recent interview,[41] 'history is fashioned by correspondences between individuals... It is the sum of all those exchanges we are contributing to, willy nilly.' These words could equally well describe Herodotus' attitude to 'history'. To take just one, particularly appropriate, example, the Persian invasion of Egypt was triggered by the king Cambyses' anger when he discovered that his Egyptian counterpart sent him not his own daughter but a substitute as his bride. His way into Egypt across the desert was made possible, like the Germans' route across the desert, by secrets disclosed by a Greek mercenary with a grudge against his former Egyptian employer (3.1-7). This pattern of personal motivation is replicated again and again through the Histories.[42]

This leads on to the final point of comparison between the English Patient and Herodotus' Histories: that is, over their status as history. As has been much discussed, the Almásy of Ondaatje's book and Minghella's film resembles the historical Almásy only in the barest details: the fictional Almásy is straight where the historical was gay; arguably he is converted also from a committed Nazi collaborator into an accidental spy. Both book and film contain the proviso that, though their characters are 'based on historical figures', the story is a fiction. But as Minghella has made clear in interviews and lectures, he is, nevertheless, concerned with history, both in the sense of showing the personal dimension of historical change, and in the very much weaker sense of giving a truthful emotional complexity to his drama.

Similar questions overshadow Herodotus' status as a historian. Herodotus' accounts of foreign peoples contain details (or omissions) that seem difficult to square with the claim, made repeatedly for example in the case of Egypt, that he himself had witnessed what he describes. Students of Herodotus are currently divided in a, sometimes vitriolic, dispute as to whether he ever visited Egypt.[43] If Herodotus lied about the extent of his travels, this would appear to cast doubt over the extent to which he can be described as a historian at all.

However, even if we maintain that Herodotus did indeed travel where he claims, there is no question that he is willing at least to interlace fictional elements, speeches and dialogue for example, into his narrative. Sometimes we can reasonably say that such passages are serving a historical end. So, for example, when the Athenian general Miltiades, in a rousing speech before the battle of Marathon, makes the assertion that Athens is fighting not just for her freedom from Persia but to be 'the first city in Greece' (6.109), implicit here is Herodotus' judgement that the Greeks are fighting as much against themselves as against the Persians. Where a modern historian might have spelled out such a conclusion in as many words, Herodotus tells it through a speech.

But other episodes are rather harder to justify in terms of a function as historical explanation. For example, Herodotus has the Persian queen Atossa approach her husband in bed and plead with him to annexe Greece and 'prove to the Persians that they are ruled by a man' (3.134). As Peter Derow has written in a previous edition of Classics Ireland,[44] 'I do not suppose that Herodotus knew what transpired in bed between Darius and Atossa... Nor does he seem to see this as a problem.' It cannot be avoided that Herodotus frequently tells stories the truth of which he knows to be, at least, suspect. That sometimes he distances himself from his stories by, for example, approving of only one out of many versions of the same event only begs the question of why he felt it necessary to retell all the versions in the first place.[45]

Like Minghella, Herodotus - by conjuring up some psychologically plausible pillow-talk or by supplying (generally less plausible) numbers where none are available,[46] slips from a focus on historical truth to one on verisimilitude. If The English Patient has given rise then to a controversy over the boundaries between history and fiction, it has only reawakened an argument as old as history itself. Herodotus may be the 'Father of History', as Almásy has it, but certainly not history as we know it.

[1] Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (London, 1992) p. 119, referred to henceforth as 'Ondaatje'.