Textual, mnemonic, and physical gaps give way to identity through body and environment in The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje and Jazz by Toni Morrison. Ondaatje's characters recover their absent personas by mutually colonizing the lovers' bodies, thus developing a metaphor of the body as topography. Morrison reverses the situation, personifying and merging the city's infrastructure with the human structure as the characters take shape synergistically across the city's spaces. Although geographical boundaries hinder characters' ability to connect, both novelists optimistically argue that bonds of human affection can transcend the physical boundaries of the world, for between them there is no gulf. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay In The English Patient, empty spaces are represented by the porous memories of Almasy and other characters in the story, their bodies, and their geography. Ondaatje draws a parallel between human memory and written texts: “Thus, books intended for the Englishman, whether he listened attentively or not, presented gaps in the plot like sections of road washed away by storms” (7). The use of a geographic comparison also foreshadows the connections between humans and the environment that Ondaatje will explore. Hana's identity is also threatened by her refusal to recognize or celebrate her body: "She had refused to look at herself for over a year, from time to time just her shadow on the walls... She searched her gaze , trying to recognize each other” (52). Hana's "shadow" illustrates her problem; in his eyes, the sensuality of her body has been extracted from a voluptuous three-dimensional form "in the same way that maps compress the world onto a two-dimensional sheet of paper" (161). Ondaatje clarifies these associations between individuality and geography by suggesting that the desert is the true home of memories: "When we meet those with whom we fall in love, there is an aspect of our mind that is historian, a little pedantic, that imagines or imagines remembers an encounter where the other had passed innocently...I lived in the desert for years and came to believe such things" (259). This is not the text, nor cartography, but the contoured earth that is the signifier of identity for Ondaatje's mutilated and nebulous characters The earth serves a similar purpose in Jazz The physical spaces of the City provide space for human connection: ". ..in the space between two buildings, a young girl speaks seriously to a man wearing a straw hat. He touches her lip to remove a little of something...The sun sneaks into the alley behind them" (8). The City is also a structured grid on which its citizens can rely: "Do this whatever you like in the City, it is there to support and mentor you, whatever you do And what happens in its backyards and side streets is all that the strong can think and the weak. All you have to do is consider the design” (8-9), however, by ignoring the design and going beyond the limits, the characters become emotionally identified with the city: “The trails. of service, of course, are worn, and there are smooth trails from the incursions of members of one group into the territory of another where something curious or exciting is believed to be found. shiny, crunchy, scary... Where you can find danger orbeing" (10-11). Paradoxically, it is these same borders which create spaces of freedom between two land masses or between two peoples, a paradox which highlights the union of the body and the city in Jazz. body plays an equally important role in its relationship to geography in The English Patient – ​​it is an evocation of a spatial, not temporal, memory: “She feels her skin, her familiarity Her own taste and flavor... it seemed a place rather than a time” (90) Almasy’s burned body also evokes a place, the desert, and the capacity of a body to be explored, in this case by a ladybug: “Avoiding the sea”. of white cloth, she begins to make the long journey towards the rest of his body, a bright redness on what appears to be volcanic flesh” (207). same sense of exploratory wonder as the ladybug Love drives them to colonize their new worlds, despite Almasy's assertion that he hates "property" the most (152). Yet even the bruise Katharine leaves him after this remark piques (and culminates) his interest in the topography of her face: "He became curious, not so much about the bruise, but about the shape of her face. The long eyebrows he had never really noticed before, the beginnings of gray in his blond hair. He hadn't looked at himself like that in a mirror in years" (152-3). Her gaze in the mirror reflects Hana's gesture, and although each character's act of self-perception is a solitary activity, it is the result of an alteration of perception through another character; “this nameless, almost faceless man” who forces Hana to reconsider her own face, and Katharine, who awakens fullness and sensitivity in the hitherto faceless man for himself. Ownership in The English Patient is permitted on the condition that each lover owns the other and voluntarily gives up their body: “This is my shoulder,” he thinks, “not her husband’s, this is my shoulder.” As lovers, they offered parts of their bodies to each other, like this, in this room by the river” (156). The juxtaposition of the lovers' nest and the river is not accidental; Kip's arm is also "geographed" as a river in his relationship with Hana: "She likes to put her face against his upper arm, this dark brown river, and wake up immersed in it, against the pulse of a vein invisible. in his flesh next to her” (125). Hana's love for Kip, at first glance, seems like a Conradesque exploration of the dark continent: "At night, when she lets down her hair, he is another constellation again, the arms of a thousand equators against his pillow, waves between them in their embrace and in their turns of sleep” (218). Kip's hair "equators" are a metaphor for Hana's mapping of his body, but their free, wavy constellation arrangement dissolves the rigid boundaries between them. Completing the symbiotic mapping, Kip inspects Hana's body with the same discovery: "As if the organs, the heart, the rows of ribs could be seen beneath the skin, the saliva on her hand now colored." He mapped his sadness more than any other. " (270). Their bodies, their culture and their geography come together when Kip consoles the grieving Hana: "...as Hana now received this tender art, her nails against the millions of cells of her skin, in her tent, in 1945, where their continents met in a hill town” (226). Kip's nails and Hana's skin, as well as the topography of the surrounding environment, merge and challenge their different continental ancestry. In Jazz, however, the amalgam of body and geography forms an exoskeleton that distorts identity. THEanonymous androgynous narrator absorbs emotions from the city's imposing and vast landscape: "A city like this makes me dream big and makes me feel things... When I look at the strips of green grass bordering the river, the steeples of the churches and in the cream and copper colored halls of the buildings, I am strong, alone, yes, but upscale and indestructible - like the City in 1926 when all the wars are over and there will be no more never again" (7). The narrator's confident declaration in peacetime hints at the illusory qualities of dependence on the City for a bodily identity that he later repudiates. A closer look salient on the junction of flesh and concrete appears in the manifestation of desire in the City: "But if she quickly runs down the streets of a big city in heels... the man, reacting to her posture, to the gentleness skin on stone, the weight of the building emphasizing the delicate, dangling shoe, is captured” (34). As the narrator points out, this is a deliberate illusion on the part of the observer: "And he would think that it was the woman he wanted, and not a combination of a curved stone and a shoe high-heeled shoe that swings in and out of the sunlight He would know the deception right away... but that wouldn't matter because the deception was part of it too” (34). the exoskeleton that the City once provided: “But twenty years of styling the City had softened [Violet]'s arms and melted the shield that once covered her palms and fingers Like shoes that removed the tough leather that her feet. naked had grown, the city took away from her the power of the back and the arms of which she boasted" (92). The once borderless city that embodied the limitless dreams of black migrants, that reinforced a community in which people "come in and out, in and out through the same door" and "settle their thighs into a seat in which hundreds of people did it too,” transforms into a rigid and confined system of streets, without the artifice of mirrors (117). In detailing Joe's new destiny, the narrator implies the power of racism to suppress physical freedom in the City: "Take my word for it, he's tied to the track...That's how the City makes you turn. Makes you do what he wants, go where the laid roads say. While letting you think that you are free; that you can jump into the thickets because you want to... You cannot get out of the path that the City lays out for you” (120). We are far from the narrator's opening remarks on the tolerant conception of the City: “. ..considered, aware of where you want to go and what you might need tomorrow" (9). Ondaatje accuses Almasy of similar geographic racism. His membership in the National Geographic Society emphasizes the dichotomy between the open desert and the distribution of boundaries by cartography, As Almasy argues, “the desert could not be claimed or owned; it was a piece of fabric carried by the winds, never held by stones, and receiving influence; a hundred changing names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties covered Europe and the Orient... after ten years in the desert, it was easy for me to cross the. borders, to belong to no one, to no nation” (138-9) The desert's own anonymity, another attack on the imprecise textual history of the West, provides the characters with the ultimate crevice in which to pack a wall. identity discharge: "It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of mist just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between the earth and the map between.