Foucault's essay. "What is an Author?" ". . . Am I just a book?"

asks the burned Englishman in Michael Ondaatje's novel The English

Patient, in response to Caravaggio's attempts to reveal his past

as the cartographer/spy Alma sy. Both questions are germane to

a central tension in the novel: What are the implications (for

texts) of an absent/anonymous narrative creator? In this novel,

the issue of "who speaks" is not an innocent one. The English

patient would like, for various reasons, to absolve himself of

authorial responsibility for his narrative. The most apparent

of these reasons is certainly to avoid the repercussions of his

being identified as Alma sy. Yet the "black body" of this "despairing

saint" gives no clue to his identity, and therefore to the "origin"

of the discourse of which he is the source. He is an unreadable

enigma, with "all identification consumed in a fire" (3), whom

the inhabitants of the villa must nonetheless translate into

This absence of locating identification poses a problem for anyone

who seeks to "read" the English patient in the terms of what

Foucault names in his essay the "Author Function,"

function he calls "religious" in nature) and what is left? In

in the absence of a Foucauldian "regulator of fiction" (119),

of revelation. His thumbs were removed when his identity was revealed,

So "What does it matter who speaks?" The answer may prove as slippery

which it sprang, Almasy's name is invoked to deploy the operations

Some topics in this essay:
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