![]() The possibility of the schwer haunts his adolescence, and its aftermath haunts his adulthood. Warlight is temporally split between Nathaniel’s teenage years and a period, over a decade later, when he returns to reflect on and investigate the seminal events of his youth. Metaphors of light and sight seem apt, for Nathaniel calls his project of return-investigating the events of his past-one of “rewitnessing” (114). We might take the ubiquity of this theme across Ondaatje’s novels as an invitation to investigate its power to illuminate. In Warlight, Nathaniel’s preoccupation has the schwer as its seed. ![]() While Ondaatje’s novels vary in socio-political context, they predominately share this preoccupation with return. ![]() The prefix “re-” aptly enfolds both “backwards” and “again,” so conveying the hope that backwards motion might facilitate even partially a do-over, a restitution to something fuller. Postcolonial literature, it hardly needs said, has an intrinsic investment in (re)turning eyes to the past, and this orientation takes many shapes: to archives, to memories, in politics of redress, in acts of recovery. Christopher McVey has observed this continuity among Ondaatje’s earlier novels, arguing that “Ondaatje’s work frequently incorporates a countervailing desire to return, to reclaim, and to bear witness to the historical and national worlds from which his characters emerge” (142). A number of motifs particular to The English Patient are also present in Warlight, but it is this last act of Kip’s-the act of return-which unites both novels with the majority of Ondaatje’s works. “They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation,” Kip tells Hana, and feels a chasm open between them ( The English Patient 287). An irreparable act on a transnational scale-the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima-intrudes irremediably on their love. ![]() The subtle and then shattering postcolonial politics of The English Patient have for a stage the intimacy of white Canadian nurse Hana and Kirpal Singh, a Sikh sapper. The four main characters of The English Patient cross paths in an abandoned villa following the Italian Campaign between 19. Of all of Ondaatje’s novels, Warlight’s European, postwar contextmost immediately resembles that of The English Patient (1992). Anil’s Ghost (2000) and The Cat’s Table (2011) tell stories of emigration and displacement, their main characters traversing the Atlantic between Sri Lanka and Britain. Warlight noticeably deviates from the postcolonial themes of many of Michael Ondaatje’s novels. For the upset of the schwer jeopardizes sense and meaning, and so demands rewitnessing, in order to be assimilated into the narrative of one’s life. Out of the schwer comes what I will call an ethics of heaviness a practiced ethics which emerges out of Nathaniel’s reckoning with the intercessions of the schwer in his life. Throughout his life, the schwer becomes a sort of lodestone around which Nathaniel’s personal credo develops. Schwer is The Moth’s language for the postwar condition of instability, and his lesson inculcates in Nathaniel a constant awareness of possible danger. A great music lover, The Moth spends the nights listening to Schumann’s Mein Herz ist Schwer ( My Heart is Heavy) on their parents’ gramophone, and tells Nathaniel and Rachel of Mahler’s schwer as a kind of warning: they need to prepare for the sudden emergence of the schwer in their lives, for “those times exist for all of us,” and they must “accept that nothing was safe anymore” (32). In this stunned postwar interregnum, Nathaniel and Rachel’s parents disappear, leaving them in the care of an enigmatic man they call The Moth. They come of age amidst the immediate aftermath of World War II, in a city still glazed with the residue of fear. ![]() Nathaniel and Rachel are teenagers in London in 1945. Or so it becomes in Michael Ondaatje’s 2018 novel Warlight, in which schwer enters the characters’ common language, after being imparted as though a moral lesson to the narrator Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel. One of those crumbs of culture with enough affect to be memorable, it is the type of tidbit to worm its way into conversation. It is both instruction and description: play this heavily, it emerges out of heaviness. Schwer-the German word for heavy, difficult-is known to be scrawled in the margins of certain musical scores, composed by Mahler and Beethoven among others. By Hannah Story-Brown // Columbia College ’19 ![]()
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