Lesley Higgins

The politics of life after death: Ondaatje’s Ghost

This essay relates Ondaatje’s novel to the philosophical fictions of Foucault and others in order to signal the contribution that literary texts can make to a “political and ethical enterprise that carries anti‐racist dissidence into a deeper confrontation with the history, philosophy, and jurisprudence of ‘transmodernity’” (Gilroy 53). Situating the Sri Lankan civil war within broader geopolitical and legal struggles, Ondaatje’s anti‐war novel diagrams the coming‐to‐dominance of new power–knowledge networks across national and ideological divides – biopolitics (defined by Foucault as the fostering of life in each individual and the population as a whole) as it is overtaken by necropolitics (described by Mbembe as the exercise of power through the wholesale threat and dispensation of death). Anil’s Ghost also elaborates alternate forms of power–knowledge relations with the reader. Thus the novel’s object (emergent transmodernity) and method (experimental dislocation of characters’ and readers’ experiences) can contribute significantly to the rerouting of postcolonial studies towards what Negri terms the “non‐place of Empire” (34). Part I analyses how, through a series of dialogical encounters, Anil’s Ghost displaces fundamental axioms that regulate the politics of truth and the politics of international systems of governance. Part II examines the novel’s method: the aesthetic strategies that both perform the displacements and enlist the reader in this ethical project.

A “Thousand Solaces” for the Modern Spirit: Walter Pater’s Religious Discourse

Friends and colleagues of Walter Pater who tried to revise public opinion after his death in July 1894 attempted to “restore” the once-notorious don’s reputation by insisting that, in his later years, he had returned to the Church of England’s pious embrace. A renewal of religious orthodoxy was invoked to sanitize a life—and a literary canon—and to rescue all from any taint of “decadence.” Subsequently, some Pater critics have obeyed similar impulses, insisting that the near-conversion that Marius undergoes, in Marius the Epicurean, is autobiographical signal and fictive fact. Marius’s experiences, they contend, constitute indirect proof that the author himself eventually re-endorsed Christian piety, and thereby either repudiated or mitigated the relativism and anti-Christianity expressed in his earliest writings.1 Other critics have vehemently insisted just the opposite: that to speak about religious suppositions in Pater’s writings is to destabilize his importance as a seminal figure in radical fin de siecle culture. Some would have it both ways: Pater attempted to “reconstruct” and “reclaim” a vague Anglo-Catholicism that enfolded aestheticism, decadence, and homoeroticism.2

Victorian Aesthetic Conditions

Between approximately 1509 and 1511, as Michelangelo completed the Sistine ceiling nearby, Raphael set to work on his first major commission in Rome, a set of frescoes for the Stanza della Segnatura at the Vatican. On one wall of the room he painted the fresco that would become famous as The School of Athens (Figure 1.1); on the facing wall a theological subject that has come to be called the Disputation of the Sacrament (Figure 1.2); and on a third, a vision of poetry, Parnassus (Figure 1.3), presided over by Apollo and the Muses and inhabited by the great poets of antiquity and the modern era. Raphael’s program presents a beautifully realized illustration of the various realms of achievement — divine, intellectual, and creative — given weight not only by the painter’s mastery of technique and originality of conception, but also by the location of his works in the heart of Christendom.

The ‘Necessity’ of Corot and Whistler in Pater’s ‘Network’ of Painters

As much as the past is a ‘living thing’ for Walter Pater, so too is the present. In ‘Wincklemann’, originally published in 1868, Pater insists that ‘the subtle and penetrative, yet somewhat grotesque art of the modern world’, and the complexity of ‘modern culture’, must be interrogated with a ‘deeper view’ (TR, pp. 178, 181, 180). The five concluding paragraphs of ‘Winckelmann’ struggle, to use Pater’s term for intellectual and aesthetic endeavor, to understand how the ancient world and its ideals can serve ‘the modern world’, nurture its instincts ‘of self-culture’ (TR, pp. 182–3), and help to delineate the contours of a ‘modern’ consciousness. All the while that Pater is studying Hellenic art and Renaissance culture, he is also developing a ‘network’ of associations among nineteenth-century French writers such as Victor Hugo, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Charles Baudelaire, Theophile Gautier, Gustave Flaubert, and Prosper Merimee, and English writers such as William Wordsworth, John Henry Newman, Dante Gabriel Rossetti,1 William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Painters also ‘penetrate the network’, however subtly, and that is the subject of my essay: how the very ‘modern mind’ of Walter Pater experienced and assessed the works of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796–1875) and James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903).2 The ongoing, intertextual3 presence of both in his writings not only reaffirms Pater’s Bourdieu-like insight that artists ‘breathe a common air, and catch light and heat from each other’s thoughts’ (TR, p. xxiv), but constitutes one of those definitional pairings which Pater deploys so effectively throughout this canon.