‘Blindness’ and the Idea of the Artist in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘“They”’ and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost

Abstract

This essay in three parts is concerned with the idea of the artist as figured forth in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘“They”’ (1904) and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000). Borrowing from Derrida’s disquisition on ‘blindness’, it discusses the texts as sites of struggle in which to attempt to write of personal loss and grief amid life’s transience and the conflicts of history is to come up continually against the impossibility of a just rendering. While cognisant of Ondaatje’s rewritings of Kipling as well as their common interest in, for example, work, assorted kinds of know-how, strange tales, obsessive states of the mind and history, it aims at staking out a shared rather than contestatory ground between the colonial and postcolonial writer through an exploration of the ‘human element’ (Ondaatje, 2000: 306) at the centre of both the short story and the novel, in particular the questions and aporias concerning suffering that have to be grappled with, understood and undergone in the process of living.