The English Patient of Sri Lankan Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje with its frequent internal references to texts of various types and genres—novels, poems, paintings, history, religion, geography, archaeology, and scientific and technical manuals—is an intertextual construct. The purpose of this paper is to unravel these intertextual underpinnings and study the way they have been deployed to produce a postmodern self-reflexive narrative and to represent the postcolonial diasporic situation of the novelist.

Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1992), with its frequent internal references to the texts of various types and genres such as novels, poems, paintings, and books of history, religion, geography, archaeology and even scientific manuals, and with its self-reflexive self-referential scheme of writing, can be called an intertextual construct. The "Acknowledgment" at the end of the novel giving an account of the sources of his references is evidence that he has made use of his wide range of reading materials for the structuring of his novel. My purpose in the paper is to unravel these intertextual underpinnings, show the patterns of their interweaving, and study the way they are deployed to produce a postmodern self-reflexive narrative and to represent the postcolonial diasporic situation of the novelist.

The concept of intertextuality means that works are made out of other works, made possible by prior works which they take up, repeat, challenge, transform. A work exists between and among other texts through its relations to them. To quote Michael Warton and Judith Still: "Texts are shaped not by an immanent time but by the play of divergent temporalities. Texts are therefore not structures of presence but traces and tracings of otherness." (Warton and Still, 1990, p. 44)

`Intertextuality', the term coined by Julia Kristeva to denote this interrelationship between texts, has two implications. First, the writer is a reader of texts before he is a creator of texts, and therefore, the work of art is inevitably infected with references, quotations and influences of every kind. Second, a text is available only through some process of reading. What is produced at the moment of reading is due to the cross-fertilization of the packaged textual material by all the texts which the reader brings to it, even his experience of some practice or theory unknown to the author. Both axes of intertextuality texts entering via authors and texts entering via readers (co-producers)—are emotionally and politically charged because they involve influences and resistances. My strategy is to bring both the axes together—the texts that Ondaatje refers to in the novel and my readings of some other texts as a reader participant that may correspond to the situations and techniques in the novel.

English Studies Journal, Michael Ondaatje, English Patient, Scientific Manuals, Intertextuality, Cross Fertilization, Literacy Predecessors, British Public Schools, Multicultural Zones, British Bomb Defusion Squad, Postmodernism, Western Power, Hybridization, Anticolonial Nationalism, Communal Books, Communal Histories.