Intertextual bastards : mourning literary nationalism in Michael Ondaatje's In the skin of a lion and The English patient

In her 1969 text Semeiotikè, Julia Kristeva coins the term intertextualité which functions to displace intersubjective relations between literary authors.The form and structure of a book, within Kristeva's estimation, enacts a specific political ideology.As such, between the beginning and end of a novel is an analogy to the author's life and death, which irrevocably links the author as the guarantor of meaning for any given text.By extension, between the bounds of a book and the borders of a nation, literary nationalism manifests the sovereignty of the nation and the authority of the author based on a family structure.By contrast, accepting the movement of intertextuality as beyond the authority of an author, as an extension of Kristeva's thought, literary nationalism must be redefined beyond the sovereign authority of the nation.This thesis seeks to demonstrate how a genealogical family structure, and the resulting hierarchies found in patemity, patriotism, and national identity, continues to support a familiar form of national literary tradition.By reading the intertextual structure of a text, a dismantling of the genealogical model may then be effected.In the words of Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism, nations are of the connections, not outside and beyond them.Thus,I will read Michael Ondaatje's two interlinked novels, In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, which dismantle familial structures and genealogical literary tradition through an open set of intertextual relations.Where a national gathering is defined as movement, there is no fixed or perrnanent space tobe of connection, not even in the intertextual text where citations are gathered.At stake within this model of intertextuality as movement, and of intemationality as intertextuality, is an abyssal thought of relations which does not inflict violence upon texts or peoples.Chapter 1 : Introductron "Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one."So Michael Ondaatje begins his novel In the Skin of a Lion with a citation from John Berger's novel G. (133).With the addition of a citation from the epic of Gilgamesh,whatbearing do these epigraphs have on a reading of In the Skin of a Lion and Ondaatje's fiction in general?In a novel that is decidedly political, how is Berger's statement, and Ondaade's citation of it reflected in the politics of the novel?Is a citation, a restatement from another text, necessanly a political statement?Texts, whether they are plays, poems, essays, newspapers, or novels, are clearly able to act within and with the political field; but then few forms of writing are without politics.As the foundation of the cultural study of literature, such an assumption about writing informs the study of national literatures, which are read as agents in the formation of nations, national identities, and nationalisms.However, the form and structure of a book enacts a specific political ideology.Between the bounds of a book and the borders of a nation, literary nationalism manifests the sovereignty of the nation and the authority of the author based on a family structure.In his Imagined Communities, historian Benedict Anderson describes the history of nations as a "family history" (201).The sovereignty or independence of nation-states, like the distinction of their cultural products (such as literature) from that of other nations, has become the foundation of both political and cultural inheritance: "and, as an ínheritance, it was compelled to enter a genealogical series" (196), says Anderson.Thus, literary and national histories seem to be modelled on the hierarchical structures of the family, which Anderson identifies as being disseminated and homogenized through the spread of "print-capitalism."Such printed forms, along with the authority of national authors, are a means of distilling or summarizinga national identity within a common language and ideology.As I hope to demonstrate, citations, references, and allusions, which open the whole field of intertextual relations, disrupt the "natural" genealogical, familial series that structure many of the hierarchies seen in the modern nation and novel.With the globalization of communication, travel, and immigration, many writers have commented upon the breakdown of national, economic, cultural, and geographical territories.As a result, a national author or an author from a nation (which is merely a privilege of birth) is less able to summarize the national experience.Canadian literature, and in particular the works of Michael Ondaatje, tend to foreground the heterogeneous nature of nationalism.For Ondaatje, the relationship between writing and the political is a discourse on relations and relationships, connections and communities, and inheritance and heritage.As Edward Said says, speaking as an Arab-American in Culture and Imperialísm on the "question of our relationship to [. ..] other cultures, states, histories, experiences, traditions, peoples, and destinies," we "are, so to speak, of the connections, not outside and beyond them" (55).In the works of Ondaatje, such connections of texts, cultures, lovers, and friends become enmeshed, intertextually, with the political.In short, intertextuality becomes a program for living internationally.Intertextuality may be understood simply as movement; it is a movement between texts.Thes e intertextual territories gesture towards relationships or, perhap s, relations.Intertextuality addresses relations between one and the other territory, text, or nation.However, an intertextual reading upsets the familiar structure of tradition by which one author begets the next.The lineage of one writer "begetting" another has been the basis of a J

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