Drifting as Consolation in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost

Résumé En

I would like in this paper to focus on Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, a novel that deals with the exhumation and identification of bones in the context of a civil war. Sent by a human rights group to investigate mass burials during the Civil war, Sri Lankan-born and North American-educated Anil Tissera returns from her diasporic abode as a forensic anthropologist after 15 years away.The novel has been the object of innumerable analyses, through many different angles. I intend to respond to one of the criticisms that has often been levelled at Ondaatje, that Anil’s Ghost meanders along too many digressions and is ‘drifting (…) away from the book’s essential business in Sri Lanka’ (Maslin 2000, 11). This paper will investigate what can be referred to as literary drifting and I will offer the hypothesis that such drifting is the route the novel takes to steal its readers from desolation (from the Latin de-, thoroughly + solus, alone) to consolation (from the Latin consolari, con- + sōlārī, to solace, to soothe). If the novel has been interpreted as a descent into the underworld, or katabasis (Herrick 2016), it seems a horizontal, rhizomatic reading approach could also be quite potent. I will argue that, far from diverting us from the main forensic purpose of the book, Ondaatje’s literary drifting contributes to creating a new space and time for the desolate, the unconsoled and the inconsolable, as if solace could only be found somewhere in between a symbolic court of law (forensis) and a public space to be shared by all (forum).