LOVE AND DEATH

"The English Patient": A Classical Tragedy of Love and Paradox (Juliana Geran Pilon, Humanitas)

At the very essence of morality is the principle of treating others as ends in themselves. Yet love is sometimes, perhaps more often than not, curiously incompatible with morality—which the lovers, in classical terms, transgress at their peril. The paradox is that love itself makes all danger, including death, entirely subservient to the inescapable, all-consuming passion that defines such love. Which is itself a kind of redemption. But is that enough to render it moral?

Admittedly, death itself is the ultimate redemption. And in a way so is passion itself, since it is equivalent to death-by-fire, death by all-consuming fire, destroying as it exalts. But much more important is the fact that passion not only betrays but also begets life.

In a strikingly ambivalent, most dramatic scene, Katherine slaps Laszlo hard in anger, desperate at her own need for him, even as she comes to him for the first time, dressed in white, presenting herself as his true (though certainly not legal) bride who needs him more than she can bear. She hates and loves him at the same time; is ecstatically happy and miserably unhappy at the same time—as she confesses to him, fully aware of what is happening to her, yet unable and ultimately unwilling to resist it.

It is not irrelevant that Katherine is married. Her status as "forbidden fruit" must surely add to the dramatic tension between the two lovers—not unlike the tension between Romeo and Juliet, and countless others in literary history. But while Juliet's love for Romeo was forbidden only by political circumstance, that of Katherine for Laszlo implied betrayal, defying both Truth and Goodness. Can Beauty do that and still be ravishing? So it seems.

The betrayal is not only adulterous (although it is that primarily, and the eventual cause of the horrible deaths of all three people caught in this tragic triangle). Loving Laszlo, Katherine also violates her own choice to stay, in effect, spiritually a virgin: by having married her best friend from childhood rather than anyone who would cause her pain, she had made a conscious decision to shun passion. She betrays her emotional celibacy when she tells Laszlo that what she likes most is to swim alone, and to take baths alone (decidedly "not with someone else" she tells him even as she is in the bath with him). And what does she hate most? To lie, she answers promptly, without blinking. Yet this is precisely what she must do to keep her lover a secret.

Laszlo too realizes, almost from the moment he lays eyes on Katherine, that he is doomed. Writes Paz: "Love begins with a look: we gaze at the person to whom we are attracted, and he or she gazes back. What do we see? Everything and nothing. After a moment we avert our eyes. Otherwise we would be turned to stone."

One of the most sensual moments in the movie is, improbably enough, the scene by the campfire where Katherine tells the gathered (all male) explorers a story from Herodotus. The camera focuses on her with almost impudent, intrusive closeness as she describes the night when the ancient queen undresses (unknowingly) in the presence of a man who will be her future lover. The close-up of Katherine shows her subliminally aware of the fact that the erotic moment she describes embraces her as well, that she is actually addressing Laszlo at whom she looks as she speaks—with the camera following that gaze. And as her figure is blurred while the focus sharpens on him, we know that Laszlo is himself the stunned voyeur, finding himself unable to resist undressing her—the willing lover/raconteuse—with his eyes. He is destined to be the inevitable victim of the splendid Medusa/Katherine whose magnificence will turn him not to stone but to burning fire. He does not avert his gaze, but looks on, mesmerized, unable to believe. The fact that he will later die as a result of literal burns is only meant to underscore the fact that he has already started to be consumed by the flame inside his body, the flame of passion and, eventually, devotion.

This man who shouts that "There is no God," who states that he does not want to be owned by anyone—that is to say, he wishes to be his own god—seems unwilling to believe that he can succumb to the greater force of love. That only insures that he will fall so much the harder for resisting, denying, desperately fearing it; he is hopelessly drawn into it for the simple reason that he happens to be human. He too had vowed to stay celibate, no less than Katherine. He detests above all "ownership"—the kind that love commands, that he cannot escape. But later, having just made love to her, he demands that he possess a part of her body, the delicate hollow in her collar bone—when in fact what he truly needs is not only every inch of her but her entire soul, which he cannot be sure he can ever possess. The fact that she loves him as much does not change that truth. These are both tragic Greek characters who fully realize the danger of passion.

Descendants of Adam and Eve, they try to avoid tasting the forbidden fruit—but, like the pre-Christian Greeks, they know that the road to love's precarious paradise leads through hell. They know that the price of their surrender must be everything. This is why they fear it and why they (and only such as they) have the privilege and misfortune to succumb to it.

Every word of this review may be true, but this much certainly is: even the author, Michael Ondaatje, wanted to see the lovers dead. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 14, 2003 10:08 PM