The otherless other, or the anonymity of water : unmapping Ondaatje’s “sand sea” self in minghella’s the English patient

Abstract

In an insightful review of Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient, Gary Kamiya implies that the film adaptor’s most formidable task must have been visualizing the “army of ghostly lovers” haunting Michael Ondaatje’s novel. In Kamiya’s view, Minghella could only manage to “capture [...] something” of the text’s crucial love theme because Ondaa- tjean love “contains an absence, an inwardness, a mysterious loss, at its heart – and language captures that absence and mystery better than film.” That Kamiya elucidates neither what constitutes Ondaatjean absence in The English Patient nor what Minghella’s ‘something’ amounts to in its film version in no way minimizes the relevance of his statement. In fact, Kamiya’s suggestion that Minghella’s The English Patient depicts loss and absence goes beyond the routine recognition in many other reviews that “The heart of the film lies in the sorrow of discovering what you’ve lost when it’s already gone.” Most of those appraisals, in never really associating the absence motif with Ondaatje’s novel, provide us with less than Kamiya’s ‘something’. In what follows, then, we would like to engage with the quality and extent of this ‘something’ that Minghella allegedly captures.