Running in the Family

1
Running in the Family

• Michael Ondaatje

2
Michael Ondaatje (1943)

• born in Sri Lanka, of Dutch-Tamil-Sinhalese
  descent
• then migrated to England in 1954
• lives in Canada (Toronto)
• 1988 Order of Canada (highest national literary
  award)
• In the Skin of a Lion (1987), The English Patient
  (1992)
• fusion between postmodernism and postcolonialism

3
Map

• you have no full picture
• orientation
• memory as mapping process
• map as abstraction
• bird's eye view
• no human presence

4
What is the relationship of a map to the
territory it represents?
5
Map

• European practice of mapping
• mapping charting territory, claiming ownership
• abstraction of the map vs. reality of space

6
If you were writing about Sri Lanka after
twenty-five years of absence, why would you start
with a map?
7
Running in the Family (1987)

• "I saw in this island fowls as big as our
  country geese having two heads . . . and other
  miraculous things which I will not here write
  of."
• Oderic (Franciscan Friar, 14th century)

8
How is Sri Lanka portrayed in this passage?
9
What is the relationship to reality?
10

• The Orient was almost a European invention, and
  had been since antiquity a place of romance,
  exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes,
  remarkable experiences. (1)
• Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)

11
Orientalism

• Orient (here Sri Lanka) as confirming European
  expectations of it (exoticism)
• expectation determines perception (fowl with two
  heads)
• Orientalism has no referent

12
Why would you start with this passage?
13
Is there a relationship between the Friar's
comment and the map?
14
Map vs. Friar's comment

• Friar's comment als alternative way of mapping
• literary mapping putting the place (Sri Lanka)
  on the "map" of European imagination

15
If this is the false map, what do we expect of
the narrative?
16
Running in the Family

• He snaps on the electricity just before
  daybreak. For twenty five years he has not lived
  in this country, though up to the age of eleven
  he slept in rooms like this with no curtains,
  just delicate bars across the windows so no one
  could break in. And the floors of red cement
  polished smooth, cool against his bare feet. (17)

17
What is his relationship to the country he has
returned to?
18
Perception

• When you return to a country you feel alienated
  from, what do you notice first?

19
What role do sensory perceptions play?
20

• Dawn through a garden. Clarity to leaves, fruit,
  the dark yellow of the King Coconut. This
  delicate light is allowed only a brief moment of
  the day. In ten minutes the garden will lie in a
  blaze of heat, frantic with noise and
  butterflies. (17)

21

• What began it all was the bright bone of a dream
  I could hardly hold on to. I was sleeping at a
  friend's house. I saw my father, chaotic,
  surrounded by dogs, and all of them were
  screaming and barking in the tropical landscape.
  The noises woke me. I sat up on the uncomfortable
  sofa and I was in a jungle, hot, sweating. I had
  been weeping and my shoulders were exhausted.

22

• I became conscious again of brittle air outside
  the windows searing and howling through the
  streets and over frozen cars hunched like sheep
  all the way down towards Lake Ontario. It was a
  new winter and I was already dreaming of Asia.

23

• I had already planned the journey back. During
  quiet afternoons I spread maps onto the floor and
  searched out possible routes to Ceylon. But it
  was only in the midst of this party, among my
  closest friends, that I realised I would be
  traveling back to the family I had grown from -

24
What is the role of maps here?
25

• I realised I would be travelling back to the
  family I had grown from those relations from my
  parents' generation who stood in my memory like
  frozen opera. I wanted to touch them into words
  a perverse and solitary desire.

26
Family like "frozen opera"
27
What role does narrative play?
28

• In Jane Austen's Persuasion I had come across
  the lines, "she had been forced into prudence in
  her youth she learned romance as she grew older
  the natural sequence of an unnatural
  beginning." In my mid-thirties I realised that I
  had slipped past a childhood I had ignored and
  not understood. (22)

29

• Asia. The name was a gasp from a dying mouth. An
  ancient word that had to be whispered, would
  never be used as a battle cry. The word sprawled.
  It had none of the clipped sound of Europe,
  America, Canada. The vowels took over, slept on
  the map with the S. (22)

30
What role does language play?
31
What do we expect about his description of "Asia"?
32
At the end of his narrative, is "Asia" going to
be defined?
33
What is the relationship of European "mappings"
of Asia and his own?
34
Multiple Mappings

• map and Friar's comment as "false" visions, as
  fictionalizations of Sri Lanka
• fictionalization is not necessarily false
• his own narrative is also a fictionalization
• What is the role of authenticity here?

35

• Everyone was vaguely related and had Sinhalese,
  Tamil, Dutch, British and Burgher blood in them
  going back many generations. There was a large
  social gap between this circle and the Europeans
  and English who were never part of the Ceylonese
  community. The English were seen as transients,
  snobs and racists, and were quite separate from
  those who had intermarried and who lived here
  permanently. My father always claimed to be a
  Ceylon Tamil, though that was probably more valid
  about three centuries earlier. Emil Daniels
  summed up the situation for most of them when he
  was asked by one of the British governors what
  his nationality was--"God alone knows, your
  excellency."
• Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (New
  York Vintage, 1982) 41.

36
Postmodernism and Postcolonialism

• there is no ultimate authenticity here
• Sri Lankan society as inextricably "mixed"
• yet, there is nevertheless a separation between
  colonizer and colonized

37

• My body must remember everything, this brief
  insect bite, smell of wet fruit, the slow snail
  light, rain, rain, and underneath the hint of
  colours a sound of furious wet birds whose range
  of mimicry includes what one imagines to be large
  beasts, trains, buring electricity. (202)

38
Why are these perceptions more important than a
map?
39

• "You must get this book right," my brother tells
  me. But the book again is incomplete. In the end
  all your children move among the scattered acts
  and memories with no more clues. Not that we ever
  thought we would be able to fully understand you.
  Love is often enough, towards your stadium of
  small things. Whatever brought you solace we
  would have applauded. Whatever controlled the
  fear we all share we would have embraced. (201)

40

• There is so much to know and we can only guess.
  Guess around him. To know him from these stray
  actions I am told about by those who loved him.
  And yet, he is still one of those books we long
  to read whose pages remain uncut.

41
Conclusion

• parallel between personal history (the memory of
  his father) and collective history (Sri Lanka on
  a map)
• any mapping can only be incomplete
• yet, mapping / narrative is also a necessity
  (postmodernism)