<i>Katabasis</i> and the politics of grief in Michael Ondaatje’s <i>Anil’s Ghost</i>
Bibliographic record
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".